[Xastir] Mapping

[Tom Russo]

On Fri, Nov 10, 2006 at 06:14:42AM -0800, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <archer at eskimo.com> flavor, containing:
> On Thu, 9 Nov 2006, Jason Winningham wrote:
> 
> > Well, it so happens that there are already some dbfawk files for the
> > TIGER shapefiles written and in place in the standard xastir
> > distribution, so you don't really have to start from scratch the way
> > Tom's tutorials walk you through.
> 
> He also has to have "dbfawk" listed in his Help-About dialog.  If
> not, then he probably needs to install the PCRE library and/or
> Shapelib (but we know he already has Shapelib) in order to enable
> the dbfawk functionality.
> 
> > Talk to the vendors about that.  Mapping programs are generally
> > somewhere between extremely unhelpful and hostile about use of their
> > data by some other software.
> 
> Except that MapInfo is a GIS program, and there is support for some
> of its file formats in the GDAL/OGR library.  If he's talking vector
> formats, he'll probably be able to use them.

But since native ogr support in xastir is somewhat preliminary, it might be 
better to use ogr2ogr to convert the mapinfo vector files to shapefile, where 
support is much more fleshed out and flexible (if you've got dbfawk enabled).  

-- 
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