[Xastir] readme.maps questions

[Tom Russo]

On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 03:45:03PM -0500, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <kg5lt at verizon.net> flavor, containing:
> More newbie questions concerning converting Tiger/Line data files  
> into Shapefiles for xastir's use.
> 
> I have read through most of the readme.maps documentation.  Overall,  
> very good, until I get to page 5.  What I am experiencing with the  
> next two paragraphs after the "To convert the polylines" heading is  
> that I don't see the files named "CompleteChain.*" after running the  
> ogr2ogr program per page 5's example.  What I am seeing are simply  
> copies of the original .dbf, .prj, .shp, .shp.xml and .shx files with  
> the original names and in some cases slightly varying file sizes.

If there are "original .dbf, .prj, .shp" etc. files, then you have NOT 
downloaded the type of data that the section of README.MAPS is referring to.
Prior to 2008, TIGER/Line data was distributed in the "TIGER/Line" format, 
not shapefile format, and so needed converting.  

They discontinued that format in 2008, and started distributing shapefiles
directly.  The instructions in README.MAPS would not work on those, and
would be unnecessary, as they're already in shapefile format.

Nobody has, as yet, created a .dbfawk file for those shapefiles, so you're
on terra incognita.  You'd have to study the metadata for the dbf attributes
and come up with a dbfawk file to get them to render properly.  You could use
the old dbfawks for TIGER/Line as a starting point, but would likely need to
modify them considerably.

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236        http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
  In some cultures what I do would be considered normal. 
                                  -- Ineffective daily affirmation