RE: [at-l] (no subject) Really about GIS or graphing programs

["Walt Daniels" <wdaniels@bestweb.net>]

A profile of the whole trail in one piece has major problems of scaling
assuming you want it on any reasonable size piece of paper. It will either
be flat or just a bunch of indistinguishable sawteeth if you blow up the
vertical dimension sufficiently. For example if you have a 20 inch piece of
paper that means the horizontal scale is 1 inch = 100 miles or a tenth of an
inch = 10 miles. That means that even the whole Presidential range occurs
within about 2 tenths of an inch.

The general area of programs that do this sort of thing are Geographic
Information Systems (GIS). These are all quite expensive - think thousands.
You might be able to get by with a simple graphing program of which there
are many, e.g. most spreadsheets can do this sort of graph. Someone at PATC
described how they did their map profiles at a MidAtlantic ATC meeting
several years ago and if I remember right he used a spreadsheet program.



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