I recenty posted<https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/ggplot2/5ZTGjl_Guvo)>this question on the ggplot2 mailing list and did not hear back, so I thought that reposting to sig-geo might be better.
I have recently released an R package called choroplethr<http://tech.truliablog.com/2014/01/15/the-choroplethr-package-for-r/>that attempts to facilitate the creation of choropleth maps in R at the state, county and ZIP code level of detail. It uses the state and county maps that come with the ggplot2 package (or is the it the maps package?). For zip maps it just renders a scatterplot against the state boundaries. I would like to render zip code choropleths using the ZIP Code Tabulated Area (ZCTA) shapefile that the census distributes here<http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/geo/shapefiles2013/main>. Hadley has a nice tutorial on how to work with shapefiles in ggplot2 here<https://github.com/hadley/ggplot2/wiki/plotting-polygon-shapefiles>. However, those directions do not work for me, and I think that it might be due to the size of the shapefile (501 MB zipped). As I mentioned on the ggplot2 mailing list, the call to "fortify" will run all night and still not finish. Can anyone give me pointers on how to work with this file effectively in R? Ideally I would be able to distribute this map as part of my package as well, but clearly the current size of the shapefile makes that prohibitive. Thanks. Ari [[alternative HTML version deleted]] _______________________________________________ R-sig-Geo mailing list [email protected] https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-geo
