[Xastir] basic map question

[Earl Needham]

Tom Russo wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 24, 2007 at 10:09:28PM -0600, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <needhame1 at plateautel.net> flavor, containing:
>   
> <snip>
>>  	It's just that they're so awfully slow to load from my hard drive -- I 
>>  would have thought they'd almost HAVE to be faster than loading a map from 
>>  the internet, but they actually take maybe 4 or 5 times as much time.
>>     
>
> It is because of the essential difference between them.
>
> The on-line maps are being downloaded as rendered images.  The shapefiles are
> being rendered by Xastir, and each line is being read in, examined, drawn
> and labeled.
>
> For big shapefiles such as county-wide TIGER/Line data this can be very slow.
> Rtree helps it somewhat (by generating a spatial index so it doesn't have to
> do very slow linear searches through the data), but there's just so much
> you can speed it up without doing a lot of special preparation on the data 
> files (some folks here have done that).
>   
    Is there some way to simply drop the amount of detail as I zoom out 
to a larger area?  I sure don't need to see every little dirt road and 
cow path when I'm looking at an entire state.

    Tnx es 7 3
    Earl

P.S.  QSL cards for my countries #100 and 101 arrived a couple of days 
ago.  Woo woooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!

-- 
KD5XB -- Earl Needham
Clovis, New Mexico DM84jk
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cw_bugs
ZUT