By the way, I looked for a shapefile viewer on Debian and found thuban. I don't know whether that is the best shapefile viewer for Linux, but it is based on libgda/ogr. When I tried thuban on overall shapefile maps for British Columbian (obtained by following links at http://downloads.cloudmade.com) it appeared to work instantaneously and well for the size (which totalled 200MB) of the 7 shapefile layers making up the map of British Columbia that is provided by http://downloads.cloudmade.com. Furthermore, I was much impressed with all the high-resolution local detail (e.g., coastlines, natural features, political boundaries to name three of the most useful shapefile layers available for the British Columbia map) that was available under the thuban zoom mode. By the way, that zoom mode worked essentially instantaneously as well.
I assume shapelib will be as fast or faster than libgda/ogr so I think we have a lot to look forward to concerning the speed with which shapelib can deliver shapes behind the scenes to plmap for that function to plot. And to anticipate a possible ( :-) ) further question from Phil, no I don't think we should get into trying to let plmap deal with several shapefile file layers at once. Instead it should be the users' responsibility to specify, e.g., "british_columbia_coastline.shp" as a filename to plmap if they want the B.C. coastlines on their plot, and if a user wants another layer in their plot with natural features on top of those coastlines, they can call plmap again with a different filename for the same region, e.g., "british_columbia_natural.shp". Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
