[Xastir] basic map question

[Tom Russo]

On Wed, Jul 25, 2007 at 05:45:49PM -0600, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <needhame1 at plateautel.net> flavor, containing:
>  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.

Make sure that "enable map levels" is turned on.  The dbfawk files *should*
be set up to do exactly as you say, but if enable map levels isn't turned on,
then everything is always displayed.

-- 
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