Writing ArcGIS Shapefiles from R; advice?
Hi Barry, The last I looked (which was fairly recently) the sld plug-in for QGIS has a very limited feature set. If the goal is to create an sld to go with a shapefile, I'd argue for using uDig (another open source desktop GIS product), which has really good sld support: http://udig.refractions.net. Dan
On 09/07/2010 03:54 PM, Barry Rowlingson wrote:
On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 11:07 PM, Gavin Simpson<gavin.simpson at ucl.ac.uk> wrote:
Second Q is; is there a way to include information about how ArcGIS
displays each layer/shapefile? For example, we'd like to give each
layer/shapefile a particular fill colour, so that when loaded by a user
into ArcGIS, the particular depth polygons have a nice gradient
representing depth. Is this even remotely possible from within R, or is
this something ArcGIS does and is separate from the shapefile per se?
Currently I am using writeOGR to read out these objects to ESRI
shapefiles.
The reason I ask these questions is because we have a lot of these lake
bathymetries and dealing with them in ArcGIS (to get separate layers and
colour those layers accordingly) by hand is a non starter and we don't
want to start writing VB scripts in Arc at this stage.
Thanks in advance for any pointers or suggestions you may have. And
apologies again for showing my ignorance as regards shapefiles.
There are some open standards for styling geospatial data, namely SLD and OpenGIS Symbology Encoding. They are XML files that define how map layers appear. If ArcGIS supports these then you just have to work out how to write the XML for the data. That probably means understanding the OGC Specs: http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/sld http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/symbol or you might find some desktop GIS that can save them - possibly Qgis or gvSIG. I have a vague memory of once reverse-engineering an ArcGIS file that encoded the style of a map, but it was all binary and a mess and I'd need a few examples to work it out. A bit more googling shows there is an SLD plugin for Qgis and ArcGIS can export them. So that might work... Barry
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