[Xastir] Tiger2006 maps problem?

[Tom Russo]

On Sat, May 05, 2007 at 10:12:51PM -0700, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <acraiga at pacbell.net> flavor, containing:
>  Hi all,
>  	I've been beating my head against the wall of the
>  Tiger 2006 maps that I downloaded from xastir.tamu.edu
>  (which seems to be down right now).  I get several things
>  that don't work well about those maps.  One is a lack of
>  colors, the other is no fills anywhere.  No water fills, no
>  parks, no built-up city areas, nothing.  I've tried every option
>  I can play with, including messing with the dbfawk files and
>  I get nothing like the maps I get from the Online/tigermap.geo
>  server.

If I recall correctly, the person who generated those maps only generated
the polyline versions, not the polygon versions.   

Shapefiles can only contain one type of feature (line, polygon, point), and
to get all the TIGER shape types requires multiple passes over the input
TIGER/Line files.  I remember telling the person who generated the 2006
shapefiles how to do the polygons, but as far as I know they never got 
uploaded.  And as you point out, xastir.tamu.edu seems to be down, so I can't
get there to see what's there and what isn't.

If you have python and gdal installed you can generate the files yourself
from the raw TIGER/Line files at the Census site.

To generate the line files you use ogr2ogr, and to generate the polygon
files you use Xastir-tigerpoly.py (in the Xastir scripts directory).

I describe the process somewhat on my "shape_web" site 
<(http://www.swcp.com/~russo/shape_web/>
although I don't actually tell how to run Xastir-tigerpoly.py there.
I guess I thought it was trivial when I wrote that page, but here it is:

  1) download the TIGER/Line file you want to convert
  2) unzip it into a new directory
  3) cd to that directory
  4) run Xastir-tigerpoly.py:
      /usr/local/lib/xastir/Xastir-tigerpoly.py -d . somename.shp
     This will create a polygon shapefile of the tiger data in the current
     directory.  Move the shp, dbf, and shx files to your xastir maps directory,     and they should Just Work.

  The -d flag will "dissolve" boundaries between the many areas that share
  a landmark name --- the tiger data would otherwise chop up big areas like
  parks and so forth into many individually labeled areas, and they look bad.

This is a slow process, but easy.  

-- 
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