[Xastir-dev] dbfawk-like things for OGR library?

[Tom Russo]

On Mon, Oct 11, 2004 at 03:27:30PM -0700, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <archer at eskimo.com> flavor, containing:
> 
> I've been working on labels for the OGR (vector) portion of gdal.c.
> OGR is a vector library that works on a bunch of different types of
> map files, including Shapefiles.
> 
> dbfawk only works currently with Shapefiles using the Shapelib
> library.
> 
> Does it make sense to try to extend dbfawk to work with more vector
> map types, or to create something new that is more general?

I don't think it is the best approach.  

There is a proposed standard for OGR display style specification ("OGR
Feature Style Specification") on the OGR/GDAL web site, and it might be best 
to try to play within that. 

<http://gdal.velocet.ca/~warmerda/projects/opengis/ogr_feature_style_008.html> 

dbfawk beats the pants off of the internally hard-coded style it replaced, 
but to generalize it to non-dbf tables might not be worth the trouble.  I've 
also encountered some data that has tables that are complex enough that it'll 
take some doing to get dbfawk's capabilities sophisicated enough to work with 
them unless I do tons of individual per-file dbfawks.

Coming up with a feature style gui sounds like a good idea.  Given the
enormous range of GIS data formats and attribute sets, making one that's 
general enough sounds like a major effort.

-- 
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/
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