[Xastir] maps

[James Cour]

> 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.

I have played with that approach.  I am still trying to figure out whether I
am more interested in a particular county, or a particular layer.  Living
200 feet north of the county line does not help make the decision any
easier.  Of course I have the same problem with picking a Wx radar since I
am near the point where three of them overlap, maybe it would be easier to
just move?

> 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.

Selection by layer works so nice for the on-line TIGER maps, hopefully this
one will make it to the top of the feature list some day.

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

I tried to figure that out, but dividing by zero screwed my computer up
something terrible. :-)

> 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.

Yes, I figured there must be more hands in the pot than just Curt, but I
have not been around long enough to appreciate everybody - yet.  I am doing
what you requested and writing a "quick start" guide for Windows XP that
should answer a lot of the Windows problems.  It will not be quite as
complete as README.WIN32, but it will make it easier for us Windows type to
do a clean install in one step.  I am about half-way done with the document.