[Xastir] A non-standard use of Xastir

[Bill Owens]

I was having some fun with Xastir the other day and thought it was a 
good example of what a cool system it is - preaching to the choir, I 
know ;)

My wife is running for the local library board, and wanted to have a 
website that would show people which library district they were in. 
The conventional way of finding out was to call the library, and 
they'd walk over to an E-sheet paper map hung on the wall and colored 
in with highlighter, and figure it out for you. I figured we could do 
better. . .

I downloaded all the available shapefiles for our county from 
geographynetwork.com (thanks, ESRI!) and after trying a few and 
comparing with the paper map found that the library districts were 
collections of voting districts. Unfortunately some of the boundaries 
had changed slightly for 2002, but I was able to overlay the 2000 
districts on the standard street map, snapshot it to a PNG, and edit 
it with the GIMP to adjust the boundaries and color it appropriately. 
Took a bit of fiddling around with the area fill tool, but the 
finished product looks pretty good IMO: 
http://home.twcny.rr.com/thefamilyowens/NOPLdistricts.png

Don't know if it will get her any more votes, but it was a fun 
project anyway ;)

Bill N2RKL