[Xastir-Dev] Re: First attempt at using dbfawk fails miserably

[Tom Russo]

On Fri, Nov 07, 2003 at 12:00:14PM -0500, a Mr. Richard Feyler of Fort Lee, New Jersey <xastir-dev-request at xastir.org> writes 'Dear Rosanne Rosannadanna':
> Message: 3
> Date: Fri, 07 Nov 2003 10:33:09 -0500
> From: Alan Crosswell <alan at columbia.edu>
> Subject: [Xastir-Dev] [Fwd: First attempt at using dbfawk fails
> 	miserably]
> To: Jack Twilley <jmt at twilley.org>
> Cc: Xastir Development <xastir-dev at xastir.org>
> Message-ID: <3FABBB35.40000 at columbia.edu>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
> 
> None of these sound like dbfawk issues at all.  Other than the missing 
> .dbfawk file for tgr*plc files.  If you send me a sample of a plc file 
> I'll cobble together a dbfawk for it.  Missing dbfawk signatures will 
> likely prevent that map from displaying.

I had a similar first impression of dbfawk until I grokked how it all
works.  Now I love it so much I'd like to marry it.  The level of control
you get over shapefile display is much nicer than before.

There are still some ways I can think of improving it (mainly regarding
even finer control of label display), but it's really cool, and worth the
trouble getting it working.

> That patch is something I'm not aware of and sounds like a shapelib 
> version issue and/or OS difference.  What OS is this?

The patch is aimed primarily at FreeBSD.  It fixes a compilation error in 
testawk.c, because FreeBSD wants sys/types and ctype to be included.  It also
tweaks the configuration script to detect whether the installed version of
shapelib includes DBFGetFieldIndex --- it was only added a couple versions
ago.  The FreeBSD ports collection includes shapelib-1.2.8, which doesn't
have this routine.  While installing shapelib without the ports collection
is the right way to go, shapelib-1.2.8 works Just Fine as long as you code
around the missing routine --- without dbfawk Xastir links with this version 
with no problem.  So my other patch was to add a DBFGetFieldIndex if the 
shaplib doesn't include it.  With this patch a user could build Xastir with 
shapefile support *and* dbfawk against the easily-installed ports version of
shapelib.

I've been using it this way for weeks, and I'm hooked on dbfawk.  Once I
have my dbfawk files tuned a bit I'll put them up on a web site for download --
I'm working on dbfawk scripts to handle USGS GIS shapefiles produced with
sdts2shp, and now my next project is to work on USFS GIS data.

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236 AHTB#1 http://www.qsl.net/~km5vy/
 echo "prpv_a'rfg_cnf_har_cvcr" | sed -e 's/_/ /g' | tr [a-m][n-z] [n-z][a-m]