[Xastir] [aprssig] TGR2SHP TIGER/Line translator is now Freeware (fwd)

[Tom Russo]

On Wed, Dec 13, 2006 at 10:11:13AM -0600, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <jdw at eng.uah.edu> flavor, containing:
> 
> On Dec 13, 2006, at 9:43 AM, Tom Russo wrote:
> 
> >Having never used TGR2SHP, I don't know if there's a clear  
> >advantage to
> >switching tools.  The process is sufficiently complex that there  
> >are things
> >that are missed by the ogr2ogr/Xastir-tigerpoly.py method, so maybe  
> >there
> >is a good reason to switch.
> 
> The only thing that bothers me about the current polygons is when  
> there are many adjacent polygons that define a single area.  This  
> results in a slightly ugly polygon and a serious mess with the labels.

I fixed that in the script by adding a dissolve-polygon option, but nobody 
ever re-ran the scripts on the data and made it public.  

You can always generate new shapefiles yourself if you have gdal/ogr and python
installed.  Download the county files from the census site and run the script 
over them.  I *think* I describe how to do so on my "shape_web" site, and I've 
passed off the information on how to do it several times to folks who were 
going to redo the shapefiles.  To date the only person who has actually run 
all the data through the scripts and made it publicly available was Derrick, 
who was using the first version of the script before it had the dissolve 
capability.

If anyone wants to try out TGR2SHP and generate better tiger shapefiles than
we have now, and make an associated dbfawk file, well, fantastic.  I'd use 'em.

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236 AHTB#1 http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
"And, isn't sanity really just a one-trick pony anyway? I mean all you get is
 one trick, rational thinking, but when you're good and crazy, oooh, oooh,
 oooh, the sky is the limit!"  --- The Tick