When I download the new new Missouri counties for example do I need to
keep both the Polygons and Polylines files?
On Sep 24, 2008, at 2:56 PM, Tom Russo wrote:
On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 02:38:08PM -0500, we recorded a bogon-
computron collision of the <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> flavor, containing:
On the county files I think you are correct. I'm now downloading the
new county files (2 or 3 anyway) and plan to play with them a bit. I
would really like the smaller roads to go away as I zoom out, it gets
awfully crowded on that screen when every single lane, dirt road and
path is rendered at every level.
Hmmm. The TIGER dbfawk files are already set to do just that.
Perhaps
you don't have "Enable Map Levels" turned on in the Map menu?
That's the
thing that tells xastir to pay attention to zoom levels when
rendering.
I have no idea why that's even optional except that when it was
implemented
there were probably reasons not to enable it. It used not to be the
default,
either. Anyhow, if you don't have that checked, then check it
because it's
what you want --- no amount of tweaking of the dbfawk file will help
the clutter unless it's enabled.
If you *DO* have that enabled and still see every single road at every
single zoom level, something else is very wrong.
The other thing I want to play with is coloring the county boarders,
Platte county and Clay county in Missouri are my primary concern and
if I give each a different color boarder it will help me a little.
I do not believe you can tweak that. See, the border lines aren't
even
really identifiable in the TIGER/Line data. If I recall correctly,
the
lines that make up the county borders have no CFCC code --- I can't
check
that for sure from work, though, only on my home machine (where I
have a
GIS program that'll help me query attributes of lines more easily).
Since there's no CFCC code to help you identify that some particular
line is
a county boundary, there's no easy way in the DBFAWK file to choose
a special
color for it.
Also, the county boundary lines would be in the "polylines" file,
not the
"polygons" file, because the counties aren't defined as big polygons
(again,
because those boundary lines don't have the proper attributes that
would have
been needed to assemble the closed polygons from the raw TIGER/Line
data).
Your better bet might be to use the NOAA county files (normally used
for
weather alerts) to outline your counties in distinctive colors.
What I
do is to make symlinks of from the /usr/local/share/xastir/Counties
directory
(which is only used for weather alerts) into the
/usr/local/share/xastir/maps/counties directory (a directory I made
under the
maps directory, and which can be used for stuff other than alerts).
Then,
in the directory with the symlinks, I make per-file DBFAWK files
that render
the counties in some custom way. I copy the
signature-based files in /usr/local/share/xastir/config (e.g.
/usr/local/share/xastir/config/nwsc_ddmmyy.dbfawk for the counties
file) to
the maps/counties directory, rename it to match the associated
counties
file and then edit it to fit. That way the alerts continue to work
using the
unmolested nwsc_ddmmyy.dbfawk file in the config directory, but the
always-on
maps use a different one. Here's what I mean:
ls -l /usr/local/share/xastir/maps/counties
total 10
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 27 Jul 7 13:43 c.dbf@ -> ../../
Counties/c_11mr07.dbf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 2597 Jul 7 13:44 c.dbfawk
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 27 Jul 7 13:43 c.shp@ -> ../../
Counties/c_11mr07.shp
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 27 Jul 7 13:43 c.shx@ -> ../../
Counties/c_11mr07.shx
[...etc...]
Here, I've linked the NOAA counties file in Counties/c_11mr07.* to
files named
"c.*" in the "counties" directory, and made a custom dbfawk
"c.dbfawk" to go
with it. That c.dbfawk file differs from the
/usr/local/share/xastir/config/nwsc_ddmmyy.dbfawk file by having a
different
color outline, fill style (in this case, unfilled) and line width.
You could customize your own by having special rules that give
special colors
to counties of particular interest. To see an example of a dbfawk
file that
does special coloring based on named shapes, take a look at my
dbfawk file
that is meant to go with the US National Atlas "statesp020"
shapefile. It's
downloadable from http://www.swcp.com/~russo/shape_web/ in the
"Miscellaneous"
section.
--
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
"Argue for your limitations and sure enough, they're yours." -- R.
Bach
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