[Xastir] Balloon tracking ?

[Jason Winningham]

On May 16, 2005, at 12:11 PM, William McKeehan wrote:

> I would like to find a way to make the GNIS files quicker; maybe if I 
> could
> break them out by county instead of my current state breakdown. 
> Thoughts?

I forgot about GNIS; I use them, too.

GNIS files are pretty large (which makes them slow to draw), and 
they're quite dense on the map.  (I should probably formulate a feature 
request so that control over the zoom level for each feature type is 
available for user configuration instead of being hard coded.)

There are GNIS files per state, then there is a "populated places" GNIS 
file.  The pop_places file has cities (populated places) for the entire 
country all listed in one file.  I took it a step further and created a 
GNIS file with populated places where the population is > X (I think 
X=1000) and cut the file size down tremendously (the USGS file is 181k 
lines, mine is just under 14k).

You can also use the display level on map properties so that they don't 
get turned on until you're zoomed way in.  I tend to use my abbreviated 
"populated places" file all the time, and just turn on the whole state 
when I need more detail (I didn't on the last several chases).

It would be easy to make a Perl script to break out a GNIS file by 
county.

Or just grep, for that matter.  Oops, that's what happens when you're 
verbose - Curt beat me to that one.

-Jason
kg4wsv