[Marble-devel] Map Processing Question

[Yann Chemin]

Hello Danuvius,

I believe you could use qgis (www.qgis.org) to save the open file as a
screenshot.
quantum GIS would actually be a good start for you, that GADM shapefile is a
vector file.

Now speaking of getting the whole lot into a PNG raster file, be careful, a
vector of 600Mb would translate in a raster of a couple of Gbs at that
original resolution.

Basically what you are looking for is a vector to raster converter. V2R

I would like to direct you to Quantum GIS as a start. GRASS is a Quantum GIS
plugin, you will get what you need there. GRASS plugin has a straight
forward Vector to Raster converter.

Unfortunately, I have not experienced using such a large vector file before,
so I cannot guarantee it works, but you have a start here.
I will send you separately my Quantum GIS introduction manuals, if any other
person is interested, i'll send to them separately (big pdfs, step by step
screenshots, easy).

Cheers and good luck,
Yann

2008/10/10 Danuvius <danuvius at gmail.com>

> Hi, Yann!
>
> This is absolutely amazing.  It is quite what I was fantasizing about, but
> never expected to be freely available.
>
> I am however finding myself to be an unexpected dummy with GIS software.  I
> am a pretty apt dabbler in all sorts of things hardware and software
> related, but GIS is really making me feel like an idiot.  Is it genuinely so
> complex, or does it just employ a lot of jargon?
>
> Long story short: Can you point me toward some specific way I could create
> a PNG (at however high resolution I choose) or an SVG out of the shape file
> (or better yet the ESRI geodatabase file, which I am yet to even be able to
> open)?  All I've managed thus far is to save images of parts of the shape
> file currently displayed on the screen.
>
> Thank you again!
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Danuvius
>
>
>
> On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 5:10 AM, Yann Chemin <yann.chemin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi Danuvius,
>>
>> have you tried GADM dataset? It has very high spatial resolution
>> (originally 30m landsat pixels i believe)
>> shapefile is here (careful it is huge!)
>> http://biogeo.berkeley.edu/gadm/data/gadm_v0dot9_shp.zip
>> main website is here: http://biogeo.berkeley.edu/gadm/
>> Any GIS software can do a buffer of 10 Km on a vector of following
>> coastlines, choose your tool, then export to PNG for Marble to have
>> it.
>>
>> good luck,
>> Yann
>>
>>
>> 2008/10/6 Danuvius <danuvius at gmail.com>:
>> > Greetings, lofty KDE Marble Devs!
>> >
>> > Can anybody advise me on how I could programmatically create an overlay
>> (to
>> > work with Marble) consisting of a 10 km "coastal band"?
>> >
>> > Basically I want to highlight--as precisely as can be done--all land
>> that is
>> > less than 10 km from the ocean or ocean-connected seas.  (Basically the
>> two
>> > "inland" Asian seas do not count, nor do lakes and rivers.)  Doing this
>> with
>> > a flat map is difficult enough (although I have done it)... with
>> something
>> > like Marble, I am not even sure where to begin.  I figured though, if
>> > anybody knew, it would be the devs working programming magic despite the
>> > math-heavy projection-defined world of... world maps.
>> >
>> > At the end of the day, I'd basically like to be able to zoom in as far
>> as
>> > Marble lets me and be able to tell whether particular cities, lakes, or
>> > other features are inside or outside this "highlighted coastal zone".
>> >
>> > If this is basically impossible, can somebody suggest some way to
>> achieve
>> > the same ends?  Arguably an impractically huge (highest resolution Blue
>> > Marble size) political map would do the trick.  I already have a Python
>> > program that can create such a highlight layer from a properly
>> preprocessed
>> > Robinson projection map.  But as far as I can tell, sufficiently high
>> > resolution political maps don't exist outside of Marble, Google
>> Maps/Earth,
>> > NASA's Worldwind and similar programs.
>> >
>> > I would be immensely grateful if somebody could point me in the right
>> > direction.
>> >
>> > Respectfully,
>> >
>> > Danuvius
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > Marble-devel mailing list
>> > Marble-devel at kde.org
>> > https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/marble-devel
>> >
>> >
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Yann Chemin
>> International Rice Research Institute
>> Office: http://www.irri.org/gis
>> Perso: http://www.freewebs.com/ychemin
>> YiKingDo: http://yikingdo.unblog.fr/
>>
>
>
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>


-- 
Yann Chemin
International Rice Research Institute
Office: http://www.irri.org/gis
Perso: http://www.freewebs.com/ychemin
YiKingDo: http://yikingdo.unblog.fr/
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