[GPlates-discuss] loading features with .xy files

[Christian Heine]

Hi Tiku

> I am new to gplates. I have some plate boundaries in gmt  xy file format (lon, lat) that I would like to load into gplates as features.  Can this be done?  Can someone direct me to the right part of documentation if this can be done.  

I believe this cannot be done in GPlates directly yet but there you can easily get around this limitation:

Use the ogr2ogr command line tool (not sure what OS you're on) and convert from GMT format to ESRI Shapefile. On Mac/unix the command is:

ogr2ogr -F "ESRI Shapfile" output.shp input.xy

After this is done, load the output.shp file up in gplates.

ogr2ogr is distributed with the GDAL Library/FOSS GIS tools.

As GPlates already uses the GDAL library, the functionality to read/write the GDAL-recognized formats (see website for list) will be implemented at some stage.

HTH,
Christian

-- 
 Dr Christian Heine
 Senior Research Fellow
 EarthByte Research Group, School of Geosciences
 The University of Sydney, Australia

 P +61 2 9114 0997
 http://www.geosci.usyd.edu.au/people/st_heine.shtml
 http://www.earthbyte.org/people/christian