[GRASS-dev] Re: v.in.gshhs - bogus horizontal lines

[Maciej Sieczka]

Markus Metz pisze:
> 
> Maciej Sieczka wrote:
>> 
>> It's not that every application is different, but that GRASS is 
>> different than all the rest in this regard - it seems. Again, I'm 
>> not saying GRASS or you are wrong, but could there be an optional 
>> switch to constrain GSHHS geometry exactly to -180 - 180 in 
>> v.in.gshhs to improve GRASS interoperability regarding this? Or is
>>  that just too much work or not interesting to you?

> Well, the previous version restricted all coordinates to -180, 180, 
> and GRASS displayed it all right, so I thought that's all right.

We seem to be using same terms for different things. By "restricted",
"constrained", "limited" to -180 - 180 I mean no feature extends over
-180 or 180 longitude vertical line. I.e that e.g. Alaska is split into
2 pieces.

>>> FWIW, I have submitted changes to make the digitizer work, no 
>>> more horizontal lines there, tested with grass-6.5.

>> Thanks for looking into this. I tried it and no more horizontal 
>> artifacts indeed, but with this modification the data imported with
>>  v.in.gshhs and exported with v.out.ogr now extend over -180 - 180 
>> slightly. Please see the attached screendump - violet is a 
>> -180,180,-90,90 box, green is "crude" GSHHS. Same happens in 
>> OpenJump, uDig, gvSIG 1.1.2, MapServer.

> Yes, that was my workaround to avoid horizontal lines, now the map 
> extends are -179, 190, roughly. You can check with v.info. BTW, 
> that's why I don't understand why the screenshot extends beyond -180,
>  it should extend only beyond 180, i.e. on the right side only. I 
> looked at other worldwide vector data like world boundaries and found
>  that a common solution is to e.g. have two polygons instead of one 
> for Eurasiafrica as in the GSHHS dataset. Eurasiafrica would stop at
>  180E with a straight vertical line, and the missing bit would start
>  as a separate polygon with a straight vertical line at 180W, then 
> going East.

That's exactly what I meant from the beginning :). Till now I've been
achieving this using a combination of GRASS vector modules, awk and
manual editing, but that's pretty tedious and error prone.

> That would be the fool proof solution to avoid horizontal lines. But
>  then you have vertical lines...

If you decide it's worth your time to provide that *as an option* in
v.in.gshhs it'd be cool.

> Of course everything is technically possible, and I can modify 
> v.in.gshhs so that it produces straight vertical lines instead of 
> straight horizontal lines. I'm not really convinced, however, but 
> don't mind if someone else wants to change this in v.in.gshhs. As 
> long as the -r flag keeps its current behaviour and on-the-fly 
> reprojection still works.

Maciek

-- 
Maciej Sieczka
http://www.sieczka.org