On Fri, Aug 10, 2007 at 09:00:29AM -0400, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> flavor, containing: > > I do have one question on the downloaded Tiger data. When I unzipped > Tennessee for example, it created two directories, Polygons and Polylines. > In the corresponding directories I see (I'll use my home county as an > example): > > /usr/local/share/xastir/maps/static_maps/TN/Polygons > -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1352805 2007-05-08 15:06 Carter_County.dbf > -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1276956 2007-05-08 15:06 Carter_County.shp > -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 25156 2007-05-08 15:06 Carter_County.shx > > /usr/local/share/xastir/maps/static_maps/TN/Polylines > -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2534921 2007-05-08 15:04 Carter_County.dbf > -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 143 2007-05-08 15:04 Carter_County.prj > -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1709364 2007-05-08 15:04 Carter_County.shp > -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 104580 2007-05-08 15:04 Carter_County.shx > > What is the difference between the Polygons and Polylines directory, if any?
They are completely different, and you need both for good maps with all the features. Polyines are linear features like roads, streams, etc. Polygons are area features like parks, reservations, military bases, lakes, reservoirs, etc. It is a limitation of the shapefile format that a single file can contain only one type of object (point, line, area), so for data that has lots of different types one requires lots of different files. This question has been asked so many times that it's a FAQ that needs to get answered in README.MAPS. It isn't. I'll go put it there now, and on the Wikified version. > What file or files do I edit to start customizing colors, line widths, etc? This is done in the "dbfawk" file associated with the data. This is sorta answered in README.MAPS, but not explicitly. There are two ways to associate a DBFAWK file with a shapefile: signature-based, or per-file based. "signature-based" looks at the list of attributes in the dbf file and tries to apply a "one-size-fits-all" set of rules to all files that match the signature. These dbfawk files all live in /usr/local/share/xastir/config, and have somewhat descriptive names. The two that are used for the TIGER/Line data are "tgr2shp.dbfawk" and "tgr2shppoly_2006.dbfawk". The first is for the polyline data, the second is for the polygon data. The second way to do this is per-file, so that each individual file can be treated differently. These files all live in the same directory as the shapefile, and have base names that are the same as the shapefile to which they apply, but with the ".dbfawk" suffix instead of ".shp" or ".dbf" A per-file dbfawk file overrides any signature-based file that matches, and applies only to the file whose name it matches. So if you want to experiment on one county you can copy the global default file (tgr2shp or tgr2shppoly_2006, depending on what you want to change) into a per-file dbfawk file that matches that county's name and lives in the same directory as the county shapefile, and then when you're done you could move it to /usr/local/share/xastir/config and it would become a signature-based file. But be careful, because re-installing xastir will re-install the default tgr2shp and tgr2shppoly_2006 files. You'll have to preserve your changes somehow so they don't constantly get overwritten when you upgrade xastir. -- 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