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Is it possible to make custom tidepoints that will work like the US tidepoints that come with either the Garmin basemap or the GPSMATE 168 Sounder Tidepoint maps? I tried searching for this here and also using google, but didn't find an answer.

I would never have figure out that gpsmapedit process on my own. I had searched the wiki since there is no manual, but didn't come across that method. I will remember it for the future. In terms of grep, it was pretty basic. I opened up the mp file and searched for:

Label=Trail_[0-9]+\ r

where each line of code to be replaced was "Label=Trail_" plus the number of the trail, from 1 to 3571. The [0-9]+ captured the variations of the trail numbering and the "\r"capture the whole line of code.

I then replaced it with:
Label=\r

This removed all the trail labels in a few seconds. Grep searches are great on code files. Thanks for pointing out that I could open up the mp file in a txt editor. When I tried using a grep on the original gpx file, I kept messing up the file. I am sure something would have worked, but had not figured out which combo was best.

Thanks for the responses. I tried to select all the tracks (before conversion to polylines) as well as after conversion to polylines and for some reason gpsmapedit wouldn't allow me to relabel the tracks (or lines). I didn't realize that the mp file was text editable until Seldom's solution. I ended up using a grep search and replace using BBEdit on my Mac partition that worked out great.

Thank-you - I am now a happy owner of a transparent map showing all the GIS tracked trails in my region! This is awesome.

Thank-you Seldom and Ingrid Cold for your replies. I tried to change the settings on my gpsr to get rid of the labels, but this only works on my gpsr when I also get rid of the road labels which I still want to see.

I tried to find a way to get rid of the labels in gpsmapedit, but I can't see an easy way to delete all the labels for the original gpx file. There are a total of 3700+ tracks in the file and deleting each will be onerous. The label itself provides no useful info since the original data came from my region's GIS website and each track is generically labelled by the local municipal government - ie: "Trail_1" all the way up to "Trail_3782". Do you know of an easy way to mass delete all the labels without harming the tracks?

Thanks for any assistance. The transparent trail map looks great otherwise on my gpsr.

So I have successfully used gpsmapedit, gpsmapper, and the toolkit to make a trail map using parallels on my mac and the tutorial above. It looks pretty good on the gpsr, but each trail shows it's name when zoomed in. Is there a way to get the name of the trail only to show up when someone selects the trail on the gpsr? Basically, I want all the trails without the trail names showing by default (but I also want the detail level to remain the same for all my other maps). I tried searching for this but couldn't find the answer. As I am a newbie at this, it is probably obvious to you guys on how to do it. Thanks for any suggestions.

The NWTrails project has accepted the shp data regarding the local trails in my area. The dataset is freely distributed on the local government website along with a wide range of other GIS datasets including things like local bridges, trams, water lines, stairs, playgrounds, parks, creeks, rivers, streets, sewers, power lines, light posts, and even the conduits for signal lights. If anyone is interested in making a local map of North Vancouver, BC, over 170 datasets can be found here:
http://www.geoweb.dnv.org/data/

I forgot to add, that they even have datasets for the local contour lines at 1m, 5m, 10m, 20m, and 100m.

First, thank-you for taking the time to reply. I appreciate it. My lofty goal was to make a garmin compatible transparent map of the trails, similar to the NorthWest Trails project that you linked to since they are missing much of the trail data for my area. Failing that, I was trying to get the data transformed into something that would be easy for the NWTrails project to integrate easily. Perhaps I will ask on their forums the best way of doing that.  I was using the GPX data simply because that is the only format that I can manipulate semi-confidently. Clearly, I will need to think this through more and I will also explore some of the other options you wrote about. Again, thank-you for your help.

Hello, I came across this forum in my search for guidance. First, I consider myself a total newbie at this stuff so bear with any mistakes I have made. I have found that my local government has published GIS data of our region including files of trails. This data is available in several formats including SHP, FGDB, Autocad, and KMZ. I wanted to eventually turn this data into a layered map for my GPS, but I am a long way from that and am just going to concentrate on getting a good GPX file for now.

After searching on how to handle these formats, I have discovered that I am further disadvantaged in that I use a Mac which seems to be lacking in GIS tools. I have managed to unzip the KMZ into KML data and then ran that dataset through gpsbabel with a simplify filter to decrease a bit of the extraneous trackpoints. This resulted in a GPX file with almost 3200 tracks. Unfortunately, the dataset is messy in that often many tracks are used for one trail, making the xml code bloated and slow - the GPX file is almost 80mb and contains about two million lines of xml code. I managed to clean out all the <ele>0.0000000</ele> lines of code to trim the xml file down to 52mb and 1.3 million lines of code, but that is still very bloated.

At this point, I have basically started to manually examine the tracks for each trail or set of trails to try and combine tracks into trails and clean up the code. So far I have cleaned 70K lines of track code, but looking at this project, this looks like it will take a long time if I continue down this route.

I was wondering if anyone has a better workflow or suggestions that I would be able to use. If anyone is interested in the original source of data, it can be found here:

metadata info page: http://www.geoweb.dnv.org/data/metadata.php?dataset=TrnTrailPublic

The "TrnTrailPublic" datasets can be found on this page: http://www.geoweb.dnv.org/data/
almost at the bottom (alphabetically listed datasets) under Trails.

Thanks for any thoughts or help.