If you are intending to use GIS for visualization and data conversion, maybe better to use something easy to start off, like QGIS: http://www.qgis.org/wiki/Download#Release_2
You have GRASS plugin there if needed. But usually you should be able to do export the files to other OGR/GDAL supported formats from within QGIS. Regards Sab On Sun, 2011-02-27 at 23:25 -0800, Hamish wrote: > Thomas wrote: > > I am a new user, just discovered grass and OSGeo. My current > > interest is accessing the files from NaturalEarthData, > > converting them into matlab format, and, using octave to > > manipulate and/or plot. > > > > I use Linux and Unix. Octave 3.4.0, Gnuplot, Grass > > 6.4.0. This workstation has Ubuntu 10.04. > > > > I downloaded the > > 10m-admin-0-countries.zip and > > 10m-admin-0-boundary-lines-land.zip files from > > NaturalEarthData. > > > > I want to use grass to display some portion of the data. > > > > Then, use r.out.mat to generate a octave compatible binary > > file. > > > > I started looking at the manual, but, quickly became > > confused. > > that would be my fault. > > > Is there a simple how to for what I want to do? > > Could you explain your workflow a bit more? there are many > choices. In general it's not so bad, and you can do matlab/oct > to and from grass without much hassle. > > natural earth is polyline data, so vector & thus v.* modules. > 2D array is raster data, so r.* modules. > see v.to.rast and r.to.vect modules. > > > do you have 2D arrays in matlab/octave from contourf() or similar > and you want to fill(), area(), or patch() a polygon coastline > over the top? > see http://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/Addons#v.out.ascii.mat > > are you using the (free/gratis) m_map toolbox? > http://www.eos.ubc.ca/~rich/map.html > or matlab's mapping toolbox? (which is using proj4, same as us) > > do you wish to rasterize the natural earth polygons into a 2D > array? > see v.to.rast + r.out.mat > > do you want to bring your matlab data into grass and plot it > there? > see r.in.mat, or v.in.lines, v.in.mapgen. > > > the first step is to bring the data into grass with v.in.ogr. > > > Hamish > > > > > _______________________________________________ > grass-user mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/grass-user _______________________________________________ grass-user mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/grass-user
