[Xastir] Re: Tons of Tiger Maps -- can we use them?

[Tom Russo]

On Mon, Nov 24, 2003 at 12:00:03PM -0500, a Mr. Richard Feyler of Fort Lee, New Jersey <jmt at twilley.org> writes 'Dear Rosanne Rosannadanna':
> > I chose a California county mostly at random (it was small and fast to
> > download *grin*) and compared the files to the files I already have
> > for that county.
> > 
> > Any idea how difficult it would be to convert them to shapefiles?

If you install gdal version 1.1.9 then you'll get a program called "ogr2ogr."  
As of version 1.1.9, OGR supports TIGER/Line format, and you can convert
the set of tiger files to a set of shapefiles with:

  ogr2ogr -f "ESRI Shapefile" destination_directory TGRfile

It appears, however, that what this does is take the entire set of .RTx files
and extract all the layers from them (polygon, chains, points, etc).  All
the line features in the collection of RTx files get into one shapefile,
all the landmarks in another, etc.  

You might be able to get something useful out of that, but it might take 
a lot of monkeying with the dbfawk files to get them to display nicely.
I only spent enough time to grok the ogr2ogr bit, and haven't tried to 
display any of this stuff yet.

Once GDAL and OGR are fully integrated into Xastir, it should be pretty cool 
to be able to pull these things in as is.  Of course, then there might have to 
be something like "ograwk" ;-)

-- 
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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