[Xastir] Area Color fills and highway colors

[Tim Gimmel]

Tom,
Thanks so much for the information.  I gonna give up on the fills for
now.  Particularly since these files won't work anyway.  But I am so
grateful for the dbfawk info.  I have already colored my highways white!
Which brings me to the basic question: what are the color codes?  Can I
find the 'list' somewhere?  Also I noticed in the dbfawk file some color
codes that I would say are 16-bit. (color 255) Which I would think would
be white.

You can see what it looks like as I work on them at
http://www.gimmel.org:8080.

Again thanks for the help and the quick response.  I have been having a
great time with xastir!

73,
Tim
KB4AMA


On Sun, 2005-01-16 at 23:08 -0700, Tom Russo wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 16, 2005 at 11:19:14PM -0600, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <tim at gimmel.org> flavor, containing:
> > All,
> > Maybe I don't understand the feature.  I downloaded county maps from
> > http://xastir.tamu.edu and I believe they are shapefiles made from
> > tigerdata.  
> 
> Yes, but they're only the line features.  
> 
> > My question is: if I set "fill" to "yes" in the properties
> > dialog, and I enable the global map fills, shouldn't just the counties
> > that I have marked be filled with color?  
> 
> No.
> 
> The shapefiles on xastir.tamu.edu have been created with ogr2ogr run over
> the TIGER/Line files to convert them to shapefiles, which only captures the 
> linear features, not the area features.  It took a little while for us to 
> figure out how to to the polygon features, and nobody has done the conversions 
> the way that Derrick Brashear did them for the linear features.
> 
> If you want area features from TIGER data, you have to install GDAL,
> download the raw TIGER files, and do the conversion yourself.  Instructions
> for how to do this are in README.MAPS (search for "Xastir_tigerpoly" for
> the command line necessary, and search for "www.census.gov" for the link
> to the raw 2003 TIGER/Line data).  So far nobody has stepped up to the plate 
> and offered to run all the states through this process and put them up on a 
> web site.  
> 
> > The way it is working now is
> > when the "Enable Area Color Fills" is checked, the whole map turns pink,
> > regardless of how the properties are set.  Not what I expected.
> 
> That's odd.  I've seen this behavior when attempting to use fill on maps
> that don't have dbfawk files defined properly for them, but it shouldn't
> apply to the tiger shapefiles from A&M.  The default fill color for area 
> shapefiles without dbfawk definitions is magenta --- enabling fill on such a 
> shapefile could make your entire map pink.  Bleah.  But since the 
> xastir.tamu.edu shapefiles have no areas to fill, that shouldn't happen.
> 
> Are you viewing only TIGER data from xastir.tamu.edu, or do you have other
> maps being displayed as well?  Try using the map chooser to turn them 
> off one by one and see if the pink color goes away --- the map that does this
> needs a dbfawk file to go with it to prevent filling that way.  If the TIGER 
> shapefile is the only file you're attempting to view and this filling happens, 
> then there's something else wrong.
> 
> I just tried enabling fill in the map properties for one of the TIGER line
> features files (which is not something you have to do if you're using 
> dbfawk-enabled xastir --- the filling of shapes is defined in the dbfawk file 
> then).  I did not see any bizarre filling of the map.  We might need to get
> more specifics from you to understand what's going on.
> 
> > Also, just one other question.  Is there any easy way to change the
> > color of the streets and highways?  Currently in these maps streets and
> > highways are black.  It would be nice if I could make them white, and I
> > could use a black background.
> 
> Yes, it's easy if you're using the "dbfawk" version of xastir (i.e. you have 
> pcre installed and didn't specify "--without-dbfawk").  Edit the file 
> /usr/local/share/xastir/config/tgr2shp.dbfawk.  You will need to look for the 
> line where the dbfawk file sets the color of the particular features you're 
> interested in, and add a "color=15" (or change the current "color=8" to 
> "color=15" if the line already sets a color).  Color 15 is white.
> This file will get clobbered, though, if you update xastir from CVS and 
> do another make install, so you'll also have to change it in your source's
> "config" directory.
> 
> If you're not using dbfawk, you'll have to modify the map_shp.c file.  I
> recommend not going that route.
>