Making Transparent Overlays with Shapefiles?

[Reeper]

I have downloaded serveral of the free programs and have downloaded the Shapefile for the Hiking trails in GA. Now I'm clueless on how to creat a Transparent Overlay so I can see the trails over the Topo map I downloaded from GPSFileDepot. Any help would be appreciated. I'm a to NEWBE AND HAVE NO CLUE.

I was able to pull the shapefile in to MapEdit but doing the set up when I import and have no idea how to tell what the correct numbers are so its located in the right position. Does it do that automatically?

Mike

[Indrid Cold]

you will need the projection information for the shapefile. If bundled with the shapefile, you can open the shapefile with Global Mapper and it will display it, if not, you will have to check with the data provider. You will have to provide this when importing it into GPSMapEdit.

[Reeper]

Yep, it has a .prj file in the set. I can import it in Mapedit and global mapper but I just don't know what to do with it.

[Indrid Cold]

So how does Global Mapper say it's projected?