[Xastir] 2004 Tiger Files

[Tom Russo]

On Tue, Feb 15, 2005 at 12:27:47PM -0800, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <archer at eskimo.com> flavor, containing:
> On Tue, 15 Feb 2005, J. Lance Cotton wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 14 Feb 2005 14:22:12 -0800 (PST), Curt, WE7U <archer at eskimo.com> wrote:
> > > I think this is a new release from the fles we processed last year.
> > > Anyone want to process them into Shapefiles and make them available
> > > for download again?  Do we have enough space on the site down in
> > > Texas to put these files?
> >
> > I have a question: Can these be processed in some way that does retain
> > the polygons (or whatever it was that causes lakes to not be filled)?
> 
> Yes.  When they were originally processed the ogr2ogr program
> couldn't do polygons.  We had no way to process the polygons into
> shapefiles.
> 
> Tom Russo hacked on a script that came with Shapelib and created
> Xastir_tigerpoly.py, which processes all of the polygons, then came
> out with a dbfawk file that worked with it as I recall.  We should
> be able to process everything all at once this year so that the
> polygons are available right out of the gate.

Yes, I use them all the time.  Process to generate them might be semi-
inadequately described in README.MAPS.  But because shapefiles cannot
contain both polylines and polygons, one has to do it by creating two separate
sets of shapefiles.  ogr2ogr can generate the linear features quickly,
and Xaster_tigerpoly.py (which requires that gdal be built with python
support, and of course requires python) will generate the polygons.

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY     SAR502  DM64ux         http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236 AHTB#1 
 "When life gives you lemons, find someone with a paper cut."