[Xastir] MrSid format DRG maps

[Curt, WE7U]

On Mon, 9 Oct 2006, Bennett, Bruce wrote:

> Does anyone just happen to be working on '.sid' support for xastir a the
> moment? It would be nice to save disk space for other needs by keeping them
> in compressed form...

No.  Anything which costs money is generaly out for the Xastir
project.  Anything that encourages public data to be tranformed to a
proprietary file format is also out (in my book anyway).

Some states have started making MrSID topo maps or perhaps DOQQ
images available for free.  Sometimes these are cropped USGS images
(no white border) as well.  Disks are cheap these days and I'd much
rather see them make the original unmodified files available for
download.

The only thing that you can currently do with MrSID files is convert
them back to an open/published standard like geoTIFF.  If they're
cropped you may have to do additional work before they can be used
in a program like Xastir.

--
Curt, WE7U.   APRS Client Comparisons: http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
"Lotto:    A tax on people who are bad at math." -- unknown
"Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates." -- WE7U
"The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"