Jan - I would use PostGIS, just as Sebastian suggests! ArcGIS does offer the same sort of functionality, but it does take a while for me and I don't find it easy to automate for multiple files.
- Ed Ed McNierney Chief Mapmaker Demand Media / TopoZone.com 73 Princeton Street, Suite 305 North Chelmsford, MA 01863 Phone: 978-251-4242, Fax: 978-251-1396 [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: UMN MapServer Users List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Sebastian Walter Sent: Monday, August 20, 2007 7:51 AM To: MAPSERVER-USERS@LISTS.UMN.EDU Subject: Re: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] Speeding up load time for huge SHP files Hi, Jan Hartmann wrote: > > How would you produce that simplified version is none is available > already? A very conveniant way of simplifying big shapefiles is dumping them in PostGis/Postgresql using shape2pgsql, then creating a new geometry column and fill the data with "UPDATE <table> SET <newcolumn> = simplify(the_geom,0.01) where the 0.01 is the tolerance factor, this number works well for me in longlat units. Then you can dump the table back to a shapefile using pgsql2shp. This way, simplifying huge shapefiles is really fast and stable, while in ArcGIS it's taking hours, and then just crashes. Regards, Sebastian