Plenty of European shapefiles for Terrascene... and conversion problems too! The lacks of data outside US is a well know problem, and shapefiles hunt is really a sport, especially for non-profit users like me (the no-bucks-and-medals hunting's men, except chocolate ones).Fortunately, those data for road and hydro networks can be recovered from some cheap software carto ressources such as this one :Route Europe (www.route66.com), a raster to vector converters's delight! All the layers are individually selectable and there are plenty of details too : even small district roads are present and not so angle fitted. Of course, some form of line "smoothing" may be helpfull and done in the vectorize process. There are numerous raster to vector converter on the market, I use an "old" free one : mapscan from the United Nation popmap software (very educative, well worth the download).This program and another goodies :http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~dk708/resources.htmGeoreferencing points from : http://www.maporama.com/share/The Land Cover is another problem. The best source is the CORINE database and the recent update (year 2000) is truly awesome : 100meters grid precision! 68Mo zip file for about 2G of data, but in raster BIL format.http://dataservice.eea.eu.int/dataservice/....asp?id=188&i=1A link to a free CORINE related shapefiles source for the whole Italian peninsula with Sardaign and Sicily that seems to be useable :http://www.centrointerregionale.it/script/corinedownload.aspBut nothing else outside the Arcxxx BIL format, except for forest coverage, somewhere...Any idea to perform the polygon shapefile transform operation easily without Arcview, chaps?What's your opinion... Colin ?

Sorry... Correct URL for Route Europe : http://www.route66.nlMine is an old version, (2001-2002) buy in a local shop at a rebate price (around 25 Euros).A little less expensive than "official" product, already in vector format but for... hmmm$$$...

Hi Bob,An interesting post, as always :)I've followed your useful links many times on Simvol!I've also got Mapscan, a very underrated piece of software.To Polygons:I've done a lot of research on shapefiles but I haven't really come up with any detailed ones.That's why I created TerraShape, so that we could edit the shapefile data, if not easily, at least for free!I'm just finishing off the next version now and hope to have it out before the new year.What it does:-Converts shapefiles to dxf, preserving the 'line types' by using different colours.-re-converts the edited dxf files back to shapefiles for processing with TS2.-Imports Fly! runways to dxf.-Imports Fly! taxiways to dxf.-Imports Fly! coastline data to dxf.-Remakes the Fly! coastline file after editing. (see my post on the Nice coastline on this forum)-contains a geographic calculator, loosly resembling Blue Marble Graphic's product.-Converts UTM shapefiles to Geodetic, no matter what Geoid/datum-Converts the other way if required. (useful for shifting data slightly)-Splits and remakes the dreaded ponetp file - necessary for the watermask.All of the above mean that ArcView is not necessary to edit shapefiles.There are quite a few free/cheap CAD programs available.This year alone, I have had around 5 or 6 free on Magazine cover disks. These are all fully working versions, if not the latest release.So, what exactly do you want to do with polygons?Colin

New TerraShape fresh on the table, thanks Santa Colin! Yes, MapScan is a fine tool, in fact a poor lonesome program lost in a bunch of high priced and more or less cost/effective professionally oriented products. To my knowledge, it is a discontinued product (?) and by the way, I'm not sure that all Windows accept to work with. The most recent version seems to be the 1.0 of fall 1999 or early 2000.On the DXF side, I use the free standard edition Intellicad2000. More simple for our job should exist I suppose.In fact, the real problem is, to my opinion, that most people are reluctant to use these PRESUMABLY too complex programs and actually they are. The secret is of course to focus just on adequate fonctionnalities.I have in the line of sight the tranformation of the huge EEA European LULC image into polygon shapefile(s), and this is not a small affair due to the respectable size (2Go!) and the fact that .BIL is an ESRI proprietary raster format not supported by... Mapscan for exemple. The quality of the grid "database" is so good that building the entire land cover with the proposed 44 layers is an attractive option, but I don't know really at present time the best method and tools to perform the task efficiently.The battle plan should be :Take the 2Go BIL (no money, this time), convert in an adequate format for the raster to vector and smoothing process in outline mode, after processing go to DXF and superimpose with extracted fly! airport "show" for last instance mods, and at last generate final shp, courtesy Terrashape (...) Exemples in the Terrashape docs shows that additions to existing layers works perfectly well, but before, we (I) have to create the whole layers from joined polygons, by the way, may be this is stupid, but... is it preferable to embed polygons or lined up is okay ? I vote for natural out of conversion boundaries lined-up, of course.And I haven't still said anything about projections and alignments between LULC and vectorized networks!A pure joy, isn't it... (hi)Good week-end, Colin.