[Xastir] Adding offline maps?

[Curt, WE7U]

On Sun, 12 Sep 2004, Steven May wrote:

> Since one of my main goals in having Xastir is to provide tracking in
> the field, away from internet access, I now need to find out how to add
> maps offline.  I downloaded the Tiger maps that are in shapefile format
> from http://xastir.tamu.edu/ as a start.  Even after reading more in
> the readme's and online, I am now stuck as to how to proceed.  If I am
> to copy the files to the maps directory I have the problem of an error
> message saying permission denied.  If there is some other program to
> run, I must have missed seeing it.

1) Make sure you install Shapelib at a minimum (see the INSTALL file
for instructions), and also PCRE if you wish to enable DBFAWK
functionality.  DBFAWK allows you to customize how the Shapefile
maps look on your system, on a map-by-map basis if you wish.

2) Make sure that a normal user has permissions to cd into the map
directories, plus make sure the files themselves are readable by
normal users.  Read about the "chmod" command, or perhaps on the Mac
you have some graphical tool for changing permissions.

3) Once you have the maps in there, you need to reindex in Xastir so
that Xastir can compute the file extents of the map, then you're
ready to use the map.  You can change some properties of the map
file in the Map Chooser->Properties dialog, and/or use custom dbfawk
files for this.

--
Curt, WE7U			         http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
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