[Xastir] drawing shapefiles for xastir

[Curt Mills, WE7U]

On Wed, 22 Jan 2003, Derrick J Brashear wrote:

> I couldn't use a GPS so I looked for a tool that would let me draw
> shapefiles overlaid on rasters. OpenEV was sufficient for that
> (http://openev.sourceforge.net), however it output a UTM-tied shapefile. I
> used shpproj from the shapelib package's contrib area to fix this so
> xastir could read it usefully:
> shpproj old new -i="proj=utm zone=17 units=m ellps=clrk66" -o="geographic"
> fill in your utm zone as appropriate.
>
> the ellps=clrk66 is to cheaply convert from nad27 datum; i tried a shpproj
> which i modified to be able to nad_cvt and the additional correction
> wasn't enough to worry about. if you have a grs80 ellipsoid map you're
> drawing on, you won't need to worry about this parameter.
>
> i considered teaching xastir to read .prj files (which some shapefile
> writers apparently write) but decided it wasn't worth it. i may revisit
> that later.

Hmmm...  So if people find Shapefiles that have been written in some
other projection, you can convert them to lat/long and some normal
datum?

This might be of use to a few people that got ahold of shapefiles
that Xastir couldn't touch.  I remember something about measurements
in feet and perhaps UTM in some of them instead of lat/long?

-- 
Curt Mills, WE7U                    hacker_NO_SPAM_ at tc.fluke.com
Senior Methods Engineer/SysAdmin
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