[Xastir] Success with shapefiles!!!

[Tom Russo]

On Thu, Jul 19, 2007 at 09:19:08AM -0500, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <RiverRidge at CenturyTel.net> flavor, containing:
>  I received the shapefiles ( from ESRI) from the local County Surveyor's 
>  office yesterday and Xastir read them right in!!  It is beautiful.
> 
>  The map tech thought that all the colors, symbols, and road names were 
>  included in the files.  When I loaded them in, the only filled layer was the 
>  lakes and the fill was fushia.  All the roads were black.  All the building 
>  locations were red Xs.  No road names were visible at any zoom level.
> 
>  For each category of object ( lakes, roads, buildings, driveways), she gave 
>  me four files (.dbf, .prj, .shp, and .shx).  I opened the roads  .dbf file 
>  in a spreadsheet and the road labels are there.
> 
>  The map tech said that on her system, the lakes were blue, each type of road 
>  was a different color ( 5 types of roads), the building locations were round 
>  dots, and each road, lake, & river was labeled.  It appears that all the 
>  options in the map chooser properties and map configure are "on". 
>  Does anyone know, can I change colors and symbols and show labels now, or is 
>  this something that the map tech has to do before she dumps we a copy of the 
>  maps?  If it is something she should do, does anyone have a suggestion as to 
>  what to tell her to change from what she did the first time?

Xastir does not know automatically what column contains the label and what
column contains the color. --- this differs for every single shapefile, and
the map tech's system must be set up with a configuration that knows what
column to use for the label and which to use for color.

To get it to display properly in Xastir you need to use "dbfawk" to tell 
xastir how to render it.

See the Xastir Wiki's "HowTo:DBFAWK" page.

-- 
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