[Xastir] Can tamu.edu maps look like Tigermaps?

[Tom Russo]

On Thu, Mar 31, 2005 at 02:10:47PM -0800, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <jmt at twilley.org> flavor, containing:
> I have installed and indexed the shapelibs from the tamu.edu site, and I 
> can see that they are indeed chock-full of value.  I have done nothing 
> else to the configuration, and I was wondering if there was a documented 
> way (dbfawk or otherwise) to make them visually identical to the 
> Tigermaps we get via downloading.  This was something I looked at long, 
> long ago but never finished and then I had to step away from xastir for 
> a while -- if it's been solved, could someone point me at the solution?

You can get them *close* but not identical.  There are a few bits of 
information in the TIGER/Line files that don't quite make it into the new
shapefiles (e.g. political boundaries seem not to be extracted as polygons the
same way other polygons are, so you can't color towns in).

Via tweaking the tgr2shp.dbfawk and tgr2shppoly.dbfawk files you could
change the rendering of tiger shapefile data.  At the moment they're
not set up to render *all* the lines and polygons that are present,
just some of them that seemed most important.  They're also set up to
use translucent (i.e. stippled) polygons instead of solid.  That's
mainly because the guy who set them up (me) actually hates the way the
tigermap web images look when mixed with his other map data, and so he
set them up to match his own prejudices.  But as long as the data is
present in the shapefiles (which means as long as there's linkages in
the original TIGER/Line data that Xastir_tigerpoly.py can use to
extract polygons), you should be able to craft a dbfawk file to make
the maps look any way you like, modulo dbfawk's limitations.

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY     SAR502  DM64ux         http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236 AHTB#1 
 "The only thing you can do easily is be wrong, and that's hardly
  worth the effort." -- Norton Juster