On Mon, Jun 18, 2007 at 02:07:07PM -0500, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> flavor, containing: > I got the WMSradar to overlay the Tigermaps by setting the radar map to a > higher layer - worked great. Besides the layer settings, what do the other > settings in the map chooser properties mean?
> [Filled (yes/no/auto), This is for vector layers, especially shapefiles. Yes means that polygons present in the vector layer are always filled, no means they're never filled, and auto means that some method of choosing automatically is used. For shapefiles that method is either the hard-coded method if you don't have PCRE installed or compiled with "--without-dbfawk" and dbfawk otherwise. Leaving this at "auto" is reasonable unless you find you have a filled-polygon layer that you would rather have unfilled, or a polygon layer that's not being filled when you want it to be. > automaps (yes/no) Automaps is an old way of choosing which maps to display. It's somewhat unnecessary now (although many people continue to find it useful) since we have much finer-grained control by using the min/max zoom level settings. If you turn on automaps in the Map menu, the automap algorithm is used. The automap yes/no setting lets you exclude some maps from that algorithm. Unless you use Automaps, just ignore that setting. And I recommend that you not use automaps unless you have a very specific use for it. I advocate removing automaps from the code, but there are still enough people who find it useful that we won't be doing that anytime soon. > and USGS DRG (yes/no/auto)] USGS DRG maps are digitized topo quadrangless from the United States Geological Survey (DRG stands for "Digital Raster Graphics"). The USGS uses a standard color palette of only 12 unique colors for all of their topographic maps, which makes it pretty easy to do a cool thing: There is a setting in the Map->Configure menu that allows you to pick a subset of the twelve colors to display --- any pixel in a USGS DRG map of one of the deselected colors is simply not drawn. The cool thing is that if you select, say, only the color brown, then only the pixels that contain contour lines will be drawn, and anything you have in a lower map level will show through. This allows you to overlay the USGS's contour lines on top of any other map data (such as aerial photos). This was originally implemented in such a way that the color selections were applied to all GeoTIFF files, which was a problem if you had a mixture of USGS topo maps and other types. The setting in the map choose was added to fix that implementation problem. USGS DRG files obtained directly from the USGS contain a nifty piece of metadata that allows you to recognize them. However some GIS departments tweak USGS topos (either to strip out the map color, or to compress them, or to otherwise monkey with them) and sometimes this process removes that bit of metadata. So "Auto" means 'look in the file for that bit of metadata, and if you find it, apply the settings in the "Map->Configure->Configure USGS DRG" dialog, otherwise do not use those settings'. "No" means "This file is not a USGS DRG topo so do NOT apply those settings" and "Yes" means "This really is a USGS topo, even if it lacks the metadata that would normally identify it as such" You can pretty much always have this at "Auto" unless you've got a bunch of USGS-derived, but defective, topo maps in GeoTIFF format. -- 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 Xastir@xastir.org http://lists.xastir.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xastir