I just spent some time yesterday using maps created from gps downloads (during an Xastir demo). I found some stuff that was quite frustrating, and I propose that they be changed. I've already changed one thing that was a dumb mistake on my own part, but I figured I'd ask before making the other change.
Until last night, when you downloaded a gps track it created a dbfawk file to go with it that set "display_level" to 256. That was my fault, and the result was that if you had dbfawk enabled, xastir would never display that gps track if you were zoomed out to zoom level 256 or higher. This has not been a problem for me before, becaus usually my gps tracks were from hikers, but the track I tried to view yesterday was from a guy who drove to Baja and back and wanted to see his whole track on a large map. It took a while to realize why setting min/max zoom wasn't letting the track be visible at zoom level 1024. Last night I changed the code in main.c to write dbfawk files with display_level of 65536 instead of 256. If you have existing gps tracks in your .gps directory and are using dbfawk, and wonder why the heck they don't display when zoomed out, it's because of the old default. You can edit those dbfawk files to fix display_level to something better suited. The reason to have a dbfawk file to go with those gps tracks is to make sure they still display properly if you were to move them out of the /usr/local/share/xastir/maps/GPS directory. Files in that directory are special-cased in the map_shp code, and have hard-coded display parameters like color (which is taken from the file name) and line style (dashed, wide). Until I hacked xastir to write out a dbfawk for these things, moving files from the GPS directory into some other directory automatically changed how they were drawn (from specific colors and line widths, to thin black lines). That was a change I had made quite some time ago. Now the other issue, that I haven't fixed: The color of the line drawn by xastir is always taken from the file name if the file is in the GPS directory, even if dbfawk is enabled and there is an existing dbfawk file to go with it. That means that is is pretty much a pain in the neck to change the color of such a displayed map --- you have to move all three files to a different base name, reindex the maps to find the new one, and redraw just to change the color. What I propose to change is to allow the dbfawk file to override the hard-coded stuff even when the file is in the GPS directory. The dbfawk file that is written out by xastir by default is set up to mimic the default behavior, so this should be a user-invisible change. If the user were to edit the dbfawk file and fine tune it, however, the changes would be visible immediately upon map redraw, and would not require clumsy name changing or moving the file to a different directory just to disable the default behavior. So, if I were to make that change and let map_shp always use the dbfawk file if that feature is enabled and the file exists, and only use the default hard-coded behavior if dbfawk is disabled or there IS no dbfawk file, would anyone be terribly offended? I think that making this change would be a usability improvement. But I'm happy to listen to those who think otherwise. -- Tom Russo KM5VY SAR502 DM64ux http://www.swcp.com/~russo/ Tijeras, NM QRPL#1592 K2#398 SOC#236 AHTB#1 http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM "And, isn't sanity really just a one-trick pony anyway? I mean all you get is one trick, rational thinking, but when you're good and crazy, oooh, oooh, oooh, the sky is the limit!" --- The Tick _______________________________________________ Xastir mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xastir.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xastir
