[Xastir] more dbfawk problems

[Tom Russo]

On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 03:16:35PM -0800, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <archer at eskimo.com> flavor, containing:
> On Sun, 2 Jan 2005, Jason Winningham wrote:
> 
> > I'm working on a dbfawk for the roads shapefile from NOAA, and it's not
> > doing what I want.
[...]
> Tom, did you see this one?  Any ideas?

I've been emailing Jason privately.  As far as I can tell, the issue is not
that dbfawk is failing to pick out the right piece of the name, but that
the map_shp.c code to draw labels does additional processing beyond that of
the dbfawk file and is throwing away labels that one might expect to see.

Using the same shapefile that Jason is using, I watched as labels for I-59
near Birmingham, AL (where Jason was trying to get things right) appeared
and disappeared as I panned the view, and vanished inexplicitly at various
zoom levels. 

In reviewing the map_shp.c code, there is some code I haven't quite unravelled
that is meant to keep map clutter down by changing how often labels are drawn,
and tons of comments about why it's not quite right yet.  I believe this is the
root of the problem Jason is seeing, as when I view the output of testawk
on these shapefiles and with his patterns, dbfawk is indeed assigning the 
correct names --- they're just not showing up when expected.

I have had no time to look at the label drawing code since then.

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY     SAR502  DM64ux         http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236 AHTB#1 http://www.qsl.net/~km5vy/
 "When life gives you lemons, find someone with a paper cut."