[Xastir] manually generated tiger map problem

[Jason Winningham]

On Apr 21, 2004, at 3:20 PM, Curt, WE7U wrote:

> Just curious, are the vector maps not good enough for you?

I would prefer vector maps, if I could find them. The only vector maps 
I've been able to locate so far are: some shapefiles from tiger data 
that have no color and no street names, the old DOS APRS maps (both 
have too little detail to be useful), and the complete tiger dump by 
county from the ESRI web site (again all black, and the street names 
are all you can see if you're viewing more than a few hundred yards 
square on the screen).

I did make a cursory attempt at compiling GDAL, but it didn't like Mac 
os X (or vice versa).  I haven't looked in detail it.

>   We have
> 2003 tiger data available to us in vector format, and Xastir already
> knows how to handle that.

Is the 2003 tiger data bundled somewhere, or do I need to do some sort 
of pre-processing on it (e.g., to get color, different levels of detail 
at different zoom levels)?  In other words, can I get the tiger data to 
be displayed more or less like the tiger-generated raster maps, e.g., 
water is blue, larger roads have different colors and wider lines, 
state parks are green, small features go away on larger views, etc?

I've looked around, but the information I've found so far is mostly 
quite terse, and leads me to believe I'll need to become a GIS/mapping 
guru to make use of the data I can get my hands on.

>   It would save you from using raster
> images, which are... yucky.

They sure are, but they're lots better than nothing...


thanks,
Jason
kg4wsv