[gdal-dev] ogr shapefile viewer

Christopher Barker Chris.Barker at noaa.gov
Thu Jan 6 12:39:03 EST 2011


On 1/6/11 9:19 AM, Mohammed Rashad wrote:
>     Instead of looking for code, I'd rather suggest to sit down and think
>     what you need. I assure you, all you need you have in OGR tutorial
>     on gdal.org/ogr <http://gdal.org/ogr> website. The only thing you
>     need more is to pass vector data/point to rendering API you want to use.
>
> yes Mateusz Loskot, i need this part. passing the vector data/point to a
> rendering API.

It's still not clear quite what you want. If you just want to look at 
shape files, I'd use an off-the-shelf desktop GIS, there are lots, QGIS 
is pretty nice.

You can also render shapefiles with mapnik or mapserver -- both are 
highly customizable and produce very nice output.

If you want a library you can embed in your own app, and maybe 
customize, that's a different story.

For Python you could use wxPython and my wx.lib.floatcanvas. It doesn't 
understand shape files, but with OGR reading them, it's very easy to 
throw points, lines and polygons on the canvas, and be able to zoom and 
pan around to look at them.

We've also got the "maproom" project:

https://bitbucket.org/dhelfman/maproom/overview

It's a bit stalled out now, but will be revived. It is designed to be a 
general purpose lib and application for interactive map data viewing and 
manipulation. It doesn't actually support shape files at the moment, but 
it does use GDAL/OGR and has support for points and polygons, so not 
hard to write a new plugin for shape.

It's also using OpenGL for speedy rendering.

HTH,

-Chris



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Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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