[Xastir] Placing Markers on map

[Tom Russo]

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 02:41:40PM -0700, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <archer at eskimo.com> flavor, containing:
> On Sun, 29 Mar 2009, Brett Friermood wrote:
> 
> > I'm trying to figure out a good way to add markers to my map display.
> >
> > I would like to mark the locations of the DNR's fire towers around me to be
> > able to plot sightings using a direction finding object.
> >
> > I thought of using objects, but I don't want to broadcast them if I choose
> > to broadcast other objects. I was tried using a small picture with a .geo
> > file, but when zooming in and out the size changes.
> >
> > Is there any other way to do something like this?
> 
> In other APRS programs an "overlay" file might be the best way to do
> this.  Xastir doesn't support overlay files though.
> 
> I can think of a few ways, some better than others:
[...]
> *) Create a map containing the objects.  You could do this by
> plotting an object and then moving it around to draw something with
> it's track, then save the track.  This creates a shapefile map which
> can then be renamed and moved to the Xastir Map heirarchy somewhere
> and used as a regular map.
[...]
> 
> There may be other ways I can't think of just now, perhaps others
> will pipe up with more ideas.

Look in README.MAPS under "Rolling your own shapefile maps."  It is around 46%
of the way down the file.  I find that the easiest way to do it is the fourth
listed method, but it involves having shpcreate, dbfcreate, shpadd and dbfadd 
from the shapelib distribution installed (easy stuff, and one of these days I 
should change our internal shapelib set-up so it builds them, too).

Point shapefiles are the closest thing that Xastir has to overlays.  In fact,
it should be a simple matter to script an overlay-to-shapefile converter,
especially in python with GDAL support.  <gets idea for evening hackage...>

-- 
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