[postgis-users] ESRI and PostGis

[Wood Brent]

--- Raghu Arni <arniraghu at gmail.com> wrote:

> **Newbie alert**
> Hi,
> What is the cheapest software from ESRI that I need to purchase to
> create a shapefile that can be used upload data into PostGIS.

If you want to spend money to do this and do it on Windows, (plenty of other
options as you've seen) there are other options than ESRI.

I'd rate Mapinfo as a better desktop mapping package that anything ESRI offer,
and other approaches exist. Also, Maptitude is probably able to do what you are
asking. 

The commercial version of Wintopo supports polyline editing/creation as well as
a pretty handy raster to vector extraction tool.

Also see http://www.acdsystems.com, they have a geographic capablity for their
Canvas 9 drawing package, which supports geotiffs & I believe shapefiles.



But I suggest you do consider Open Source alternatives. GRASS may be overkill
for what you want, but you are not likely to outgrow it, JUMP is a very
effective package to do what you are asking, & I understand QGIS is all but
able to, so will be very soon. They will both allow you to edit data directly
in PostGIS (I undersatnd) as well as shapefiles.

QGIS is perhaps the easiest way to import shpfiles into PostGIS tables.


Bent Wood