TIGER shapefiles - using and interpreting - mapping

I know of the US GIS TIGER file format from years ago, but have never used it.
I'm very shortly going to need to very quickly implement simple geocoding and vector graphics of roads and other features.
Where do I go for information - are there tutorials, example queries, etc?
Are there other ways to include geocoding and basic mapping in a mobile (no internet) device?
-Adam

As far as I'm aware of, there aren't many applications that make use of the TIGER/Line format directly. Most apps use TIGER files that have been translated into ESRI's shapefile format.
Edited to add:
Is there information on ESRI's format available?
There's an ESRI whitepaper describing the file format.
If you're planning to use shapefiles in an application, there are various libraries out there.

The OpenStreetMap project imported TIGER data, you might find useful code snippets there. See the TIGER page on the OpenStreetMap wiki for more information and links

Related

Need local SDK tool for parsing native pdf file with large tables

User needs to parse native-pdf(selectable data, not scanned, no OCR required) in local. The pdf files may be over 400 pages with large tables. Some tables may not have clear borders. Is there any API I could use?
Thanks!
Now that I know you don't want an API, I might recommend that you check out ItextSharp, from nuget. I have used this several times in the past, and there are many stack overflow forums on how to use it. https://www.nuget.org/packages/iTextSharp/5.5.13.1
EDIT: I apologize, it looks like iTextSharp has been replaced with iText 7 https://itextpdf.com/en/products/itext-7
It seems there are several PDF parser APIs out there you could use. PDFTron looks promising, and they offer a free trial: https://www.pdftron.com/pdf-sdk/parsing-library/
DocParser may also be helpful for you, https://docparser.com/features.
I found all of these through a simple google search, so it may benefit you to do some research for yourself. As we can only make broad suggestions based on the information in your question.

using LEADTOOLS to convert doc to pdf

I am playing around with Leadtools to see how it might benefit me but i am a little frustrated with their documentation regarding how the process works. I am creating a library with methods that take an input file, convert it to pdf, add a qrcode to the file and save it and then reading the qrcode again.
Does a pdf have to be converted to an image before leadtools is
able to read the qrcode?
Does leadtools allow converting from
doc to pdf and then adding the qrcode or do i have to convert it to
an image as well?
Is there anywhere I could look at code
samples of how I can go about doing what I talked about other than
the leadtools site itself?
I am sorry to hear that you are having difficulties, but I will do my best to get you pointed in the right direction.
To answer your questions:
A1.) Yes, the PDF will need to be rasterized before the LEADTOOLS barcode engine can be used. Our barcode engine will only work with raw image data. Once the file is decompressed into raw data, we will not access the file any further.
A2.) Yes, you can rasterize Microsoft Word documents using either our file I/O methods or with the LEADTOOLS Virtual Printer. Once you have the raw image data, you can pass it to the barcode engine to write the QR code into the data. Once the barcode is written, you can then compress the image into any supported format, including (raster) PDF. You can also create a searchable PDF by running the resultant image through an OCR engine & outputting to PDF.
A3.) The LEADTOOLS SDK has a main barcode demo that should illustrate the ability of the SDK to handle the features you describe here. There are also tutorials in the help file, and various projects on our support forums. We have also created a couple different CodeProject articles here:
Multi-Platform Barcode with LEADTOOLS 18
How to Read Barcodes from Images using LEADTOOLS
You haven't mentioned here what programming language you are developing with or what the specific problem are that you have encountered. Without knowing either of those, it's difficult to get more specific into any methods or other resources to check out. For a simple raster conversion of a Microsoft Word Doc to PDF and writing a barcode, I think this would probably take between 10-15 lines of code.
If you have not already, I would highly recommend sending an email to Support#leadtools.com or open a live chat with the LEADTOOLS Support team from LEADTOOLS.com. We can get into more specifics there and help you more directly with any issues you are encountering.
Walter Bates
LEADTOOLS Developer Support
I tried adding this as a comment, but it is apparently too long for that. So I have added it as another answer.
Even if you are building a DLL, I would suggest starting out building a simple demo with a view of the image so you can see what exactly is happening to the image. Once you are comfortable that the image is being modified the way you want, then implement that code in your own library.
Also, I would recommend testing out the toolkit with the provided main demos. The demos are there to illustrate the different options you have access to in the code. If you can accomplish what your application or library will need to do through the demos, then it would be worth your time to begin coding specifically what you need. You might even need to use multiple demos to verify the tools can accomplish the goals that you have. You have all the toolkit code for the demos, so you can take them apart and use the specific pieces that you need in your application.
If you are having trouble identifying which demos to try out or whether the toolkit has the specific functionality that you need, your best bet is to contact Tech Support directly to ask. We are here to help get you pointed in the right direction.
To get down to brass tacks, the source of the image data is not all that important from the perspective of the barcode engine. It needs a RasterImage handle (raw image data) to write the specified barcode. Whether the image data is created on the fly, read from file, or generated from a scanner, it does not make a whole lot of difference.
To find the main .NET barcode demo, I would start out by going to the LEADTOOLS shortcuts. To get there, go to the Start menu -> LEADTOOLS -> Help and Demos. The shortcuts are broken down by programming language, feature, and then the base toolkit. You should be able to find the WinForms .NET barcode demo here:..\Shortcuts.NET Class Libraries.NET Framework\01 Imaging\07 Barcode
Our toolkit example is a .NET WinForms project, but it will work in ASP.NET also.
Here are some links to tutorials if you want to dig right into the code:
Loading and Displaying an Image in WinForms
Reading Barcodes
HOW TO: Load and Display an Image with WebImageViewer
There was also this recent code tip posted illustrating how to read and write UTF-8 characters in a QR barcode.
We provide both .NET 2.0 and .NET 4.0 DLLs for our barcode engine. Both of these work within Visual Studio 2012.

How to store openstreetmap data locally on an iphone

I'm working on a project for college and I'm having great difficulty with part of it.
Simply put, I am looking to do the following 5 things:
download the open street map data for my city
store that data locally on the phone's harddrive.
view that data in my iOS application as a map
place markers on the map.
draw paths along roads between those paths.
I have been working on this particular part of the project for a number of weeks and I'm getting nowhere with it. I haven't even been able to figure out how to store the map on the phone let alone view the map data. I've tried using the "Route-Me" library but cannot get it working (although it seems to be one of the best libraries for using openstreetmap data so I am looking to learn how to use it). I feel pretty goddamned defeated.
If anyone has accomplished any of the tasks I am trying to do could you please link me to tutorials/guides/videos that you have used.
I'm not looking for people to give me code or do the work for me, I want to learn how to do this, but if anyone can point me in the right direction of sites that I could learn off I would be very grateful.
Any advice or feedback would be much appreciated
Here's how I ended up solving the problem.
Since Tilemill doesn't natively read .osm/.o5m/.pbf files I used Osmosis to convert a .osm file into .shp files.
I then created a new project in Tilemill and added the particular .shp files I wanted as layers to the new project. It takes a little bit of tinkering to get the map to look like you want it to but it's very similar to css and pretty easy to pick up as you go.
Once I had the map looking the way I wanted it I exported it as a .mbtiles file. This takes a long time to make and the files can be very large depending on how detailed the tiles are. I did one map of Ireland with zoom levels between 7-14 inclusive and I did one map of just Dublin city with zoom levels of 11-17 inclusive. Even though the map of just the city of Dublin had much less tiles, they were both ~200MB in size.
I then found this tutorial online which explains how to store the .mbtiles file in you application and how to read it: http://martinsikora.com/creating-mbtiles-db-for-ios-mapbox-from-hi-res-map-image
Here are a few other links that I found useful:
http://www.kindle-maps.com/blog/using-tilemill-with-openstreetmap-data.html
http://mapbox.com/developers/mbtiles/
http://mapbox.com/mapbox-ios-sdk/api/
http://mapbox.com/developers/api/#static_api
http://support.mapbox.com/discussions
I hope this is useful to someone
I would suggest trying the MapBox iOS SDK. It is actually forked from the Route-Me library and will allow you to accomplish everything on your list.
A key point to remember is that you have another step in between downloading the OSM data and storing it locally on the iOS device, that is, generating the map tiles and storing them in some sort of database.
Here is an example iOS app using the MapBox SDK that has both online and offline map sources and is a good place to start.

How can I parse, manipulate, and save Adobe Photoshop files?

How can I write a script or program to manipulate Adobe Photoshop files? I'd like to be able to do something like read a Adobe PSD file, rename the layers, and save it back to a PSD format.
The files look to be saved with a combination of XML and serialized data. I looked at the file's code and see that it has <x:xmpmeta near the start, did some google searching to find the wikipedia article about xmp - Extensible Metadata Platform, but I'm unclear if that is the format for the entire file or just for the metadata portion.
I saw that there is a PSD parser class for PHP available, and not a bad article about how to use it, although it seems like it is just for reading / converting and not for writing / saving.
But I'd like to know:
What format are these files stored in?
Where are the guidelines for interfacing with that format?
Are there some classes / tools available for manipulating that file format? Any language would be fine for a start.
I'm happy to do more research on my own but I'm hoping for some guidance to know what I should be looking for.
I'm not familiar with it myself, but there is an official SDK for Photoshop available that should let you do all that and more with .psd files.
There are not so many options. The general advice would be to look into buying Adobe InDesign Server. In some cases it can be cost prohibitive and you might be interested in 3-party SDKs. Unfortunately there are a few options in the market. One of them is Graphics Mill image processing SDK (http://www.graphicsmill.com/photoshop-psd).
Disclaimer: I work for Aurigma which runs Graphics Mill project.

Simple Geographic Data Sources for a Web App

For a web app I'm working on, I need to know the lat/lon of about 300 US cities. I also need to know the lat/lon for every US zip code.
Does anyone know of a free source to get this information?
Freebase will likely be able to help you. Here is New York and it has Lat/Long.
The Wal-Mart Expansion video used Freebase to get it's data, and it sounds like you're doing something similar.
Take a look at Ben Fry's Zip Code Visualizer. This is part of his book Visualizing Data.
There is an online database at Geocoder.us. And a simple perl module (we added a soap service to this so we could simply access it from any language, and the longest part of the development process was downloading database (it's about 4 GB).) The geocoing database is available from the US census bureau, a good article on getting this setup can be found here.

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