[Xastir] Prefered map format?

[Nate Bargmann]

* Alan Crosswell <alan at columbia.edu> [2003 Nov 05 15:39 -0600]:
> The pretty maps are all based on commercial products such as UIview's 
> use of Precision Mapping maps.  You can find some nice DRG rasters which 
> are scans of USGS paper maps.  Otherwise you can play around with 
> shapefile maps, but they are not so pretty as say those made by 
> Precision Mapping.

Hi Alan.

Okay, I was not so clear on that.  I thought I was simply looking in the
wrong places.

> It's hard work to get automatically rendered maps to 
> look nice.  Of course, Xastir is freeware and uses free map data so I 
> feel a little better about the maps not being so pretty.  I believe 
> there's some work going on with respect to caching of downloaded maps. 
> I too want my Xastir station to work "unplugged."

I understand the free nature of Xastir and the maps.  I did not mean to
disparage anyone's hard work on this project, in fact I wish to thank
them heartily as I'm involved in another project and I know firsthand
the time sink these projects are.

I hope that Xastir will support caching the downloaded data into some
kind of a database and be able to reuse it as well as download more data
points and rebuild it on the fly.

> If you use shapefile maps and "configure --with-dbfawk" you can do some 
> customization of how the shapefile maps look, but they still look 
> amateurish (that's a good thing, right? :-)

I'm using the pre-built package in the Debian archive, so I'm not
exactly sure whether --with-dbkawk was used.  It probably was.

As for an amateurish look, I'm not so sure that is a good thing.  I
firmly believe that Linux based systems offer many advantages to hams
over Widnows of any release.  The problem is one of first impression and
while I know that is not a fair way to judge something, that's how many
people do judge things.

I'm not at all up to speed on Xastir yet, but I'm mystified as to why
the Tiger data I downloaded is not rendered the same as that which is
dynamically downloaded.

> See README.MAPS.  Read it 
> about 6 times and it will start to sink in;  There's a lot of dense 
> information in there.

I've it at least twice and I'm not sure how four more times will be
beneficial, but I shall give it a go.

73, de Nate >>

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