[Xastir] ESRI shapefiles and dbfawk

[Tom Russo]

On Wed, Dec 15, 2004 at 11:04:37PM -0700, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <jewen at shaw.ca> flavor, containing:
> 
> However, having the dbfawk file in place, it seems like the redraw map takes
> longer than before. That makes sense, since now every element has to go
> through the parsing before Xastir decides to draw it or not.

Yep, I'd expect that.

> Now I really have to figure out how to separate the roads into major
> highways for the whole province, and then smaller more detailed sections
> that are more reasonable than trying to parse out a 40 MB file to draw a 4
> square mile section!

This is where you're likely to see the most benefit of speed.  Chopping up
the shapefile into shapefiles of smaller geographic regions will really help, 
because xastir can exclude whole files just based on the index it builds.

I'm not familiar with any simple tools that can do this.  Perhaps Gerry can
suggest one?

Your other option, of course, is to write a simple one using shapelib
to pick through the shapes and only write out those that fall within a 
certain geographic region, or which match particular DBF field values.

-- 
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/
 "That which does not kill me is better than that which does."
    --Irving Nietzche, lesser known of the famous Nietzche twins