[R-sig-Geo] Writing ArcGIS Shapefiles from R; advice?

[Dan Putler]

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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