[Xastir] maps

[Gerry Creager]

Caveat: I'm up early, there's not nearly enough coffee onboard, and I'm 
down with a cold... that said...

Curt Mills, WE7U wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Sep 2003, James Cour wrote:
>>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.

Recall, however, that shapefiles can also include layer data within the 
file: Different elements can have different attribributes.  Not all 
shapefiles are organized as Roads or Lakes, Rivers and Waterways.

It's convenient when they are, for our purposes, but not the norm.

>>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.

With a new computer in hand, I've got to get Xastir working here. 
However, it's more getting the ancillary libs compiled and properly 
placed, which I've gotta do for some other projects anyway, that is the 
killer.  Xastir's almost always behaved nicely for me!

73, gerry n5jxs