[Xastir] Xastir Maps ?????

[Tom Russo]

On Tue, Apr 26, 2005 at 06:46:40AM -0700, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <n7nat at nwinfo.net> flavor, containing:
> Got a question concerning Tiger maps, I have been using the online Tiger 
> maps and thought I would just download some of the local county maps to 
> the hard drive to speed up the mapping process. After doing that, the 
> maps come up just great but they don't have all the detail like the 
> online Tiger maps, they look more like line maps with no detail, what am 
> I doing wrong or is there another set of maps that I should be using and 
> setting up ???

You can't get the downloadable shapefiles to look like the online tiger 
rasters.  Some of the information ins missing, and xastir's rendering is 
limited.  But they can be useable.

The local county maps come in two flavors: line and area.  You want both.

To render them best, you need dbfawk enabled.  To have that, you must install 
pcre and verify that xastir's configure script finds it.  When you configure,
you should see both pcre and dbfawk with "yes" at the end.

With both area and line versions of the tiger shapefiles, and dbfawk enabled, 
xastir should be able to display the tiger data with a fair amount of detail 
and colored polygons representing the various areas that get colored in the 
on-line versions.  The street labels can be quite unattractive, but they
are functional at close zoom levels.  To tinker with how they're rendered, 
you would edit the "tgr2shp.dbfawk" and "tgr2shppoly.dbfawk" files in
/usr/local/share/xastir/config (or wherever you install xastir).  If you come 
up with something substantially prettier than what the stock files do, then we 
could use your changes in the distribution.

-- 
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