[Xastir] Local offline maps

[Curt, WE7U]

On Tue, 10 Mar 2009, Dale Seaburg wrote:

> Background:  I am a newbie to xastir.  I have played with it a bit from time 
> to time, but my interest has been in the HamHUD as far as APRS is concerned.

Hi Dale!  You seem familiar somehow...  hi hi


> Questions:	1) what is the best way to either cache views of a center 
> point with say a 25 to 50 mile radius and various zoom scales (1 in = 2mi, 1 
> in = 5 mi, etc.)?

Xastir has support for doing snapshots of your current view, but
that's kind'a UI-View-istic...  See below.  But to answer this
question further, if you have map views that you really like, you
can turn off all the objects and stations, turn on and then turn off
snapshots, and if you have ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick compiled
in, you'll see both a snapsshot.png and a snapshot.geo file appear
in ~/.xastir/tmp/ directory.  If you're not familiar with '~', that
is shorthand for your home directory, often /home/<user>/ on Linux.
The shells know the shorthand too, so you can do "cd ~" or even just
"cd" to go to your home directory.  Files and directories that start
with '.' are normally hidden directories, but with a special flag to
"ls" you can see them, as in "ls -a" or "ls -al".  Simple huh?


> 			2) are there any good offline maps of a given area 
> that have some reasonable zoom ability?

Yes.  Tigermap data in Shapefile format.  The colors and fills won't
look exactly the same as the online stuff (not quite as pretty), but
the raw information is there, which is probably what you really care
about.


> Boiling these two down to the final question:
> 			3) what is the best approach to not having internet 
> service, but still have good maps?

For street maps, Tigermap data in Shapefile format.  See the
README.MAPS file and ask further questions here once you do that.

-- 
Curt, WE7U.				archer at eskimo dot com
http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
   Lotto:  A tax on people who are bad at math. - unknown
Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates. - WE7U.
The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"