Author Topic: Req: More options / locations on the GOTO menu  (Read 4317 times)

dgood71

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Req: More options / locations on the GOTO menu
« on: February 21, 2011, 11:56:35 PM »
The GOTO menu option should be a very convenient way to get to a specific spot on the map.  The coordinates option provides that -- if you know the coordinates.  The cities feature seems to be extremely limited.  It only seems to know about major cities...  but there are lots of more obscure places that I might want to go.

I propose/suggest/beg for this:
Integrate the "populated places" info from http://geonames.usgs.gov/domestic/download_data.htm (under the Topical Gazetteers subsection) into the GOTO menu.  We could first choose a state to narrow down the list, then choose a populated place by name.

For those of us in the US, it would make finding the locations of small towns much easier.  The format of the freely downloadable file contains the names of thousands of populated places and their coordinates, but the data might need to be massaged a little to work right.  (It's delimited with the "|" character)

Anyway, incorporating this data into Topofusion would make finding even obscure US towns or villages a snap.  It would mean no more hunting for the nearest large city or trying to look up coordinates manually somewhere else to enter into TopoFusion.

One other suggestion, although perhaps less useful, would be to have Zip Code  and/or Area Code lookups on the GOTO menu as well.  Personally, I'd find the Populated Places much more useful than either of those though.
« Last Edit: February 22, 2011, 08:54:20 AM by dgood71 »

dgood71

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Re: Req: More options / locations on the GOTO menu
« Reply #1 on: February 23, 2011, 01:34:43 PM »
As a followup to the above request, I did a little more reading and found that I could change the city-small.gpx file to add more place names, and I've done so using the Populated Places data I mentioned in my previous post.  It works really well, with one small caveat --  now the city and town names show up all over the map and there doesn't appear to be any way to turn off their display.

The functionality to go anywhere easily is great, but not being able to see my map because of tons of small town names all over negates the usefulness.

So, here's an additional feature request -- give us the option of turning off the display of the city names that are read in from city-small.gpx.


ScottMorris

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Re: Req: More options / locations on the GOTO menu
« Reply #2 on: February 23, 2011, 02:25:01 PM »
If you uncheck the box next to the layer in Windows->GIS Layers it should turn display off, but still read it for the "find" function.

The software will also read city-large.gpx if it exists in the GIS layers, so there's another option.

Thanks for the feedback, we definitely need some more powerful search options.
Scott Morris - founder and co-author of TopoFusion
email: smorris@topofusion.com

dgood71

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Re: Req: More options / locations on the GOTO menu
« Reply #3 on: February 23, 2011, 02:51:36 PM »
That did the trick!  Thanks!