[Xastir] Re: World shapefile map

[Curt Mills, WE7U]

On Thu, 20 Nov 2003, Wilbert Knol wrote:

> So, for the world shapefile map, I *do* need tiger.geo ?
> (Not "tigermap.geo" as per below??)

Sorry, "tigermap.geo".  It's in your "xastir" source directory if
you've updated CVS recently.



> XASTIR now says (even without the verbose option):
>   Couldn't download the Tigermap image
> ...and the chooser does not show the world map.

Huh?  That means it's trying to download the image.  Just how it's
trying to do that when you haven't selected "tigermap.geo" in the
Map Chooser, I don't know.  Perhaps you have a sufficiently old copy
of Xastir in that snapshot that it has the hard-coded tigermap
selection stuff still in it.

Zoom in on a small area of the U.S., using a small Xastir window (to
keep the downloaded image size small) and see if you get a map.
Tiger is not good for maps of world scale.


> I can't find tigermap.geo in /usr/local/share/xastir/maps, nor
> anywhere in the source tree.
> Sorry: I am totally ignorant about map file formats. I assumed
> tigermaps had nothing to do with shapefile maps.

It doesn't.  If I said it did, don't listen to me...

Tigermap depends on libcurl or wget to fetch the map, and
ImageMagick to display it.  ImageMagick depends on a whole lot of
other things.  If you've got ImageMagick successfully compiled in,
you might still get another message about "can't find delegate" or
something like that, which happens on Windows boxes sometimes when
ImageMagick can't find the code piece it needs to display a certain
file image.


> Any hints appreciated....I'll get on top of this eventually :-)

Ok.  The key is persistence.  Let's cover all the bases again:

Make sure you're running a very recent snapshot (Nov 17th?) or CVS
version of Xastir, which has the Tigermap stuff moved to the Map
Chooser.

Assuming you ran "./bootstrap.sh" before "./configure", you should
have config files that know about "tigermap.geo".  Were there any
errors at the "./bootstrap.sh" phase?  If so (depending on what they
are), you may not be getting a proper "configure" script created.

You may have to upgrade your automake/autoconf tools at this stage.
This is something the developers have to keep up with constantly but
the users typically don't, unless they run CVS.  Different versions
of automake/autoconf go together, but I can't tell you off-hand
which ones make a good pair.

At the "./configure" stage, you should see at the end that
ImageMagick has been compiled in.

Make sure you start Xastir from a shell and leave that shell up, so
you can see any warning/error messages.

If you have "tigermap.geo" in your xastir directory, copy it to your
/usr/local/share/xastir/maps directory.  "touch" the file, which
will update the timestamps.  Go to your Map menu and select "Index:
Add New Maps".

Go to "Map->Configure->Configure Tigermap" and take the timeout
slider all the way to the right (max timeout).

Bring up Map Chooser and see if "tigermap.geo" is listed.  If you
have a bunch of files/directories that start with capital letter or
numbers, "tigermap.geo" will show up _after_ all of those due to the
sorting used.

-- 
Curt Mills, WE7U                    hacker_NO_SPAM_ at tc.fluke.com
Senior Methods Engineer/SysAdmin
"Lotto:    A tax on people who are bad at math!"
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