[Xastir] MrSid format DRG maps

[Derrick J Brashear]

On Tue, 10 Oct 2006, Curt, WE7U wrote:

> 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).

GDAL might be able to link against a MrSID SDK, which would mean it would 
come along for free with GDAL raster support, but I'd still like to find a 
free format with good compression to use instead. DjVu is probably it, but 
work has been such that I haven't had the time I need to do anything about 
it (or much else)

> 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.

PA has unmodified DOQQs online (geotiff, bil or bsq) and they are 
collarless, but i can find no evidence they're cropped.