[Xastir] Projections and protrusions.

[Tom Russo]

On Tue, Dec 21, 2004 at 08:41:50PM -0700, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <jewen at shaw.ca> flavor, containing:
> I got another set of files from my government buddy... I was missing one of
> the shapefile sets for the 32k ski route.
>  
> I got a .prj file with this set, so I got excited! However, it doesn't seem
> to help me much in Arcview. Still the same weird numbers as I point around
> the screen.
>  
> GEOGCS["GCS_North_American_1983",
> DATUM["D_North_American_1983",
> SPHEROID["GRS_1980",6378137.0,298.257222101]],
> PRIMEM["Greenwich",0.0],
> UNIT["Degree",0.0174532925199433]]

Sigh.  This .prj file matches the one for EPSG number 4269.  It's saying that 
your data is in unprojected geographic coordinates (lat/lon) in the NAD83 
datum.  Which clearly they're not if your numbers aren't ranging between +/-180 for one set, +/-90 for the other.

If your coordinates don't look at all like latitudes and longitudes, then 
there's some sort of projection being used and the correct .prj file would 
start with "PROJCS" ("projected coordinate system") not "GEOGCS" 
("geographic coordinate system").

Hope you get it worked out.  
-- 
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/
 "There's a special place in hell for people who create purely arbitrary
  'geospatial' data and make it available to others with poor metadata."
     -- Gerry Creager