[Xastir] .shp vs poly.shp

[Tom Russo]

On Sun, Apr 17, 2005 at 10:36:43PM -0500, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <keith.kaiser at gmail.com> flavor, containing:
> I use http://xastir.tamu.edu/2004/states/ for maps and download the
> entire state file. In that file by county are files label e.g.
> GIS/MO/MO_Platte_County_Poly.shp and GIS/MO/MO_Platte_County.shp can
> someone please explain the difference to me and then make a
> recommendation as to which I should be using in Xastir?

The one without "_Poly" contains only linear features (roads, airport runways, 
etc.).  The one with _Poly contains area features (boundaries, parks, airports, 
lakes, etc.).

Shapefiles can contain only one type of feature (point, line, or area), and so 
the two can't be combined.  Until this last batch of shapefile conversions,
the tamu server only had the linear feature version.  The area feature 
shapefiles took a little more doing, but most people who like the TIGER data
wanted them, too.

If you just want a road map, use the .shp version.  If you only want colored
polygons to represent various areas, use the _Poly.shp version.  If you want
something that looks more like the tigermap web site, use both.

-- 
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