[Live-demo] Re: Bounced post ...

[Hamish]

Hi Frank,

> I was going to post this to the mailing
> list, but it was bounced. Were my comments out of line?

I didn't manually bounce anything, it must have been an automatic
rejection.
this could either be because:
* your sending email address needs to be subscribed to the list
  to post (stops spammers)
* no big attachments (as relayed to hundreds of people)
* wrong To: email address was used
* ?

the header of the bounce should explain what went wrong.
your message & feedback are most welcome.


for a quick answer, many of the softwares on the disc will do
this. asking the authors which is the best might start a riot :)
many many roads to get there...


qgis is great for editing shapefiles.

personally I mostly use GRASS GIS, it is arguably the strongest
for raster work.
 http://grass.osgeo.org/grass64/manuals/html64_user/index.html
 (see modules v.in.ogr, r.to.vect, v.to.rast, r.contour, ...)

lots of good stuff from the Java desktop GIS packages too.

GDAL/OGR is the file format rosetta stone we all rely on (as do
many of the big commercial outfits).


in converting the raster to a shapefile, do you want contour
lines, line features (roads) extracted, as a series of x,y,z
points, ...?



any FAQ can live here:
  http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Live_GIS_Disc


regards,
Hamish


----------------------------------------------------



Not only am I new to the forum, but
I'm new to GIS work in general. 



I downloaded the Live CD and installed it on a virtual machine and it's
working great. I'm trying to build a suite of GIS tools I can for the various
tasks I have to do at work and it's great having so many products right
in front of me. It's highly quality work and I appreciate all the hard
work to pull it together. 



What would be really helpful to me (and possibly other new-to-GIS folks
like myself) is a FAQ-type list of questions with app answers. For example:




Do you want to edit shapefiles? Try xxx, yyy, zzz.


Do you want to style shapefiles? Try ... 



Do you want to work exclusively with raster files?


Do you need to work simultaneously with raster and vector files?




Do you want to convert one file into one another format?


Do you want to convert raster to vector? 

Vector to raster? 

Vector to another vector? 



etc. 



If there were a couple dozen questions with short answers it would really
supplement the disc quite well. 



For instance, I'm trying to figure out how to convert a raster (binary
GRID) file into a shapefile. I dink around in the various programs on the
CD, but I don't know if I just can't find the "convert raster to vector"
option in a particular app or if it isn't there at all. A short little
Q&A text file would be nice to help at least focus my initial search
a little bit better. At the least I (hopefully) would be pointed to the
best choices for my purpose. 



Hope this makes sense! 

Frank