[Xastir] maps

[Curt Mills, WE7U]

On Tue, 23 Sep 2003, James Cour wrote:

> A display level zoom drop down box would be a great idea; I was going to
> suggest myself.

We'd need two levels, min/max, and have to store them in the map
index in memory and on disk.  Not a big deal, just have to do it.


> And since we are asking Curt nicely,

You know, there are 11 other developers...  ;-)


> is there any reason we
> cannot have an option to do Tiger either from Terraserver or local hard
> disk?  If I have all the layers downloaded for my local area and stored on
> my computer, I should be able to configure my local Tiger maps to work with
> just the layers I select (similar to the main Tiger dialog box), without
> having to click through all the individual map files.  Since I live in a
> large metro area (Chicago) there are six different counties to deal with so
> there are lots of different map files to choose from.  I never manage to get
> it right the first time, and if I switch the view to topo maps, I have to
> start all over again if I switch back to vector mapping.

I fully understand your predicament.  I have the same difficulties,
switching between topo and street maps constantly.  You can
alleviate some of that by reworking your map directories by levels
for the shapefiles, and giving the subdirectories good names like
streets, water, counties, etc.

Something like this:

    streets/
    water/
    counties/
    misc/

Then just put all eight counties worth of the lkA level under
"streets".  Select the subdirectory instead of the individual files
and you'll select all the streets in one shot.  A bit of a pain to
reorganize, but that's one method that'll work.

Another method is to make the layers you're not interested in
unreadable by the system by changing their file permissions (chmod
000 filename), or deleting them from the system, then re-indexing.

I don't currently have any plans to implement selection-by-layer in
the map chooser, or adding selected maps to the map bookmarks, but
both of those are on the feature request list.


> Xastir is quite the piece of work.  While it was a bit of a pain to compile
> and install under Windows, once you get it working it is simply amazing.
> Kudos to Curt and the other developers!

Kind of makes the performance/price ratio astronomical, doesn't it?

Don't forget to thank Frank G, the one who coded the original
versions and make it all work!  Without those versions there would
be no Xastir project now.

-- 
Curt Mills, WE7U                    hacker_NO_SPAM_ at tc.fluke.com
Senior Methods Engineer/SysAdmin
"Lotto:    A tax on people who are bad at math!"
"Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates!" -- WE7U
"The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"