[Xastir] US Topo GeoPDF?

[Curt, WE7U]

On Sun, 18 Mar 2012, Lee Bengston wrote:

> On Sun, Mar 18, 2012 at 12:16 PM, Tom Hayward <esarfl at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I just discovered the USGS US Topo map download site
>> (http://nationalmap.gov/ustopo/index.html). In the past I have used
>> USGS Topo quads in geotiff format, but these downloads are "GeoPDF".
>> It doesn't appear Xastir supports this format. Did I overlook
>> something? How difficult would this be to add?
>>
>> Tom KD7LXL
>
> Fyi, Tom Russo added a script a while back that converts the geopdf's to tiff.

Be aware that the end result will be a tiff file with all of the layers present, so it's not the same as the geoPDF setup where you can turn on/off various vectors.

I mostly ignored/forgot about this geoPDF format until February when I was in a 3-day search management class and the teacher showed us the US National Map.  I investigated the format for a few days after that and came to the conclusion that the format is a serious hack that I don't really want to play with.

My dream formats:  geoTIFF base rasters for topo and aerial views, plus ESRI Shapefile vector files for the rest.  Given those formats any GIS program worth its salt (and Xastir) can turn on/off layers at will and tile everthing together into a contiguous map.  Actually, can skip the topo lines on the basemap and give those to us as a Shapefile vector map as well, then everything will scale beautifully.

-- 
Curt, WE7U.        http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
APRS Client Capabilities:  http://www.eskimo.com/~archer/aprs_capabilities.html