[Xastir] What about the Great Lakes?

[Tom Russo]

On Sat, Mar 20, 2004 at 01:23:33AM -0700, a Mr. Richard Feyler of Fort Lee, New Jersey <russo at bogoflux.losalamos.nm.us> writes 'Dear Rosanne Rosannadanna':
> On Fri, Mar 19, 2004 at 11:19:33PM -0800, a Mr. Richard Feyler of Fort Lee, New Jersey <archer at eskimo.com> writes 'Dear Rosanne Rosannadanna':
> > On Fri, 19 Mar 2004, Jack Twilley wrote:
> > 
> > > >>>>> "Curt" == Curt Mills <archer at eskimo.com> writes:
> > >
> > > Jack> I'm using the "world" and "states" maps as mentioned in the
> > > Jack> README.MAPS file and other sources, and everything looks great
> > > Jack> with one minor exception -- the Great Lakes are grey, not blue.
> > >
> > > Curt> Using dbfawk or not?
> > >
> > > Not.  Would that make a difference?
> > 
> > Not sure whether it will.  It certainly can though.  You'd be going
> > through the dbfawk files in that case and everything can look
> > totally different.
> 
> I'd be willing to look at it in my copious spare time, too.  But I don't
> know what "other sources" would give me the "states" maps.  I bet that 
> with dbfawk they could be made to display any way you wanted.

OK, using the world file as listed in README.MAPS and the states file
from National Atlas, the great lakes seem to exist only as void space
outside the shapefiles themselves, so there's nothing there to
represent lakes to fill with blue.  You could always set your
background to blue instead of grey...

Have you thought about downloading the "Streams and Waterbodies"
shapefile from National Atlas?  That would at least have area features
for the lakes and then some.  With dbfawk you could select only the
water features you actually cared about and fill them with blue,
without displaying every single stream and river in the country.  (I
think --- the file is huge and it's still downloading, so I haven't
played with it yet)

-- 
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/
 "It is inhumane in my opinion to force people who have a genuine
  medical need for coffee to wait in line behind people who apparently
  view it as some kind of recreational activity."  -- Dave Barry