VMAP0 Hints & Tips

This page contains some useful VMAP0 hints and tips.

No matter how familiar we are with a dataset, there are always new things to be learned, new techniques that might be useful. This page lists some of these that I have found, or have been told about. If you know any more, please share them.

Country Borders
Looking in one of the boundary folders, such as this one: v0eur/vmaplv0/eurnasia/bnd/ there are a couple of files that provide country borders. polbndl.lft contains the internal province or region borders of a country, without any coastlines. polbnda.aft contains the same internal borders plus coastlines, but as filled areas. Of course its easy enough to change filled areas to lines - in Arc Explorer select 'Theme Properties >Style >Transparent Fill'. But what if you want 'just' the country borders, without the internal province or region borders ? These are hidden away in a different area - v0eur/vmaplv0/rference/polbnd/, and the file to look for is polbnd.aft. This file covers the whole world. An identical file can be found in each of the four libraries.

Colored Countries
Wouldn't it be nice to have all of the countries on your map filled in a different color ? Here's how to do it: Load the continent of your choice and browse to v0eur/vmaplv0/eurnasia/bnd/polbnda.aft or similar. Select 'Theme Properties'. In the box marked 'Classification Options', click 'Unique Values'. In 'Field' choose 'na2', and all of the countries will be filled a different color, any of which can be edited by clicking on that color. You can even change the fill from solid-color to one of the different fill options in each country. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem possible to get color-filled countries without internal borders, so we are left with the only option of filling each country by hand in your graphics program. Unless you know something different, of course ?!