On Mon, Dec 11, 2006 at 11:06:03AM -0700, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> flavor, containing: > > 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.
I only heard one comment, and it was favorable. I just committed a change. It was very simple. As of now, if a shapefile is in the GPS directory and there is a DBFAWK file with the same base name, and Xastir is compiled with DBFAWK support, the DBFAWK file controls the rendering, period. If there is no dbfawk file, or if DBFAWK is disabled at compile time, the old fixed-style, color-based-on-file-name behavior is still there. Unfortunately, I discovered that the dbfawk file we've been writing out did not match the style that the hard-coded stuff used. It had 1 "lane" solid lines instead of fat dashed lines. I fixed that so new GPS downloads will create dbfawk files that render the gps tracks the same way as before this change. But it does mean that if you have a stock of downloaded GPS tracks with associated dbfawk files, they will suddenly look different, because the old dbfawk files will now be honored instead of mostly ignored. If this happens to you, you can do one of two things: remove the dbfawk file to revert to the old behavior, or edit the dbfawk file to give the behavior you want. The variables to change are "pattern" (which should be 1 to match the old rendering) and "lanes" (which should be 3. I hope that now that the rendering of gps downloads is controlled by the dbfawk file instead of the file name and the name of the directory in which it lives, users will have better control over the presentation of GPS data. Now a question: is anyone aware of a good tool for tweaking shapefiles, as in removing garbage points? I downloaded a GPS track, and there was a single extra point at the beginning that was garbage --- several degrees jump from the first and second point, and after that it was fine. Xastir is drawing a huge line from the starting point to the second point, and has a rendering problem at zoom levels below 8 when it tries to draw that line (fills the screen with horizontal bars). Unfortunately, I cannot find any tool that will let me delete that first point from the shapefile. I've tried qgis, but even though it'll let me edit the layer and will flash the point when I click the "delete vertex" tool on it, it doesn't actually do the deletion. Grrr. Any helpful hints would be welcome. Of course, I could always write a quick tool that links with shapelib and writes out all but the first vertex, but that seems like too much of a hack, even for this simple task. -- 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
