| GIS |
[Mar. 13th, 2006|04:41 pm]
wetkneefarm
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A property inventory seems like a perfect opportunity to use GIS. But I've been trying to get a GIS program to work for days and days and am just about ready to give up.
First I downloaded ArcExplorer, which seems to be the toned down, free version of ArcMap, which is what I learned on. But ArcExplorer seems to not have the features I need. I found a shapefile showing the geology of Virginia, but ArcExplorer can't seem to figure out how that file relates to other shapefiles I have, like a simple map of Virginia with counties.
So I looked a little further. SPRING looked like a very intense, free program. But the program comes out of Brazil and I can't seem to figure out how to make it work right since all of the help pages are in Portuguese. (Babelfish was moderately helpful, but reading the pages just became too painful to continue.)
Next stop, Openmap. Openmap was in English and I got a little further with it. But the program still got stumped when I put in that geology map. I'm starting to think that maybe there's something wrong with the geology map, even though I was able to open it on its own under ArcExplorer. Oh, and Openmap made all of my xterms all funky --- they changed from filling up 2/3 of the screen and being white type on a black background to filling up 1/5 of my screen and being black type on a gray background. Ugly.
Gah! Maybe I just want to draw pretty pictures in the GIMP. Maybe I want to call ArcMap's company and ask them how much ArcMap costs and whether they have an educational discount (although I usually assume that if there are no prices on the website, it's out of my price range.) Maybe I want to ask anyone who reads my blog if they've had good luck with a freeware GIS program? |
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