Hi Dirk,
Thanks for this. I did find a workround but your technique is considerably simpler!
regards,
William
Thanks Nathaniel. I missed on both on these and both look useful, QGIS definitely. Very grateful for that. I did look at the *.shp file description and it’s straightforward.
Done enough research to know I can go ahead on my idea – a very simple portal for young people into the CIA World FactBook presenting a small subset of its database, a few quizzes, a jigsaw or two and a few basic map projections supporting some simple chloropleths and cartograms.
Well to reply to my own post, I discover I can. This @ http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/files/scicomp/Dloads/GISProgramming/HowToSelectShapeFileSubset.pdf gives a manual method for doing it with ArcMap and I was able to extract a single shapefile for the United Kingdom and therefore must be able to extract its polygons under program control.
Is there in fact an honest to goodness (Windows) application (I don’t mean a script) that will do this? Otherwise I’ll write my own but it’s not a trivial task and naturally I would prefer to use a utility.
Help appreciated.
[Added] And I’ve just found this C# based on Net 4.0 framework project here @ http://sharpmap.codeplex.com/ which is perfect for me. All sorted here but comments and advice certainly appreciated. Thank you.