[Xastir] Using Mapbox maps on Xastir

[Tom Russo]

On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 01:42:59PM -0600, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <russo at bogodyn.org> flavor, containing:
> On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 12:39:36PM -0700, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <curt.we7u at gmail.com> flavor, containing:
> > We don't handle either of those.  I'm not sure what kind of info is in
> > there, but if it's possible to run "gpsbabel" against either one and
> > turn them into a GPX file, you can then turn that into a Shapefile and
> > use it in Xastir.
> 
> The best converter for such formats into shapefile would be ogr2ogr, one of 
> the command line tools from GDAL.  It groks both GeoJSON and KML.
> 
>   ogr2ogr -f "ESRI Shapefile" outputfile.shp inputfile.kml

BTW, since the OGR library supports both of those formats, there is no good
reason why Xastir (which has hooks for using the OGR library to read vector
formats) could not be made to do so.

But the OGR code doesn't support the sort of individual cartographic 
configuration that the shapefile code does through its "dbfawk" package.
The dbfawk package might be clumsy and hard to use, but it is orders of
magnitude better than the sort of hand-editing of source code that adding
support to the OGR code requires.  The current OGR code in Xastir is very
much like the old, pre-dbfawk shapefile code, where each particular type of
shapefile had hard-coded rendering applied.  

Unfortunately, dbfawk is very closely tied to the shapefile format, reading
attribute information from the dbf files that go along with shapefiles.  
It would in theory be possible to generalize it and use OGR to extract feature 
attributes of any type of OGR-supported dataset, but nobody has done that.  It 
would be a lot of work.

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236        http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
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