A list of places to find good offline maps

We used to have a big list of these on the xastir.org wiki, but on examination almost all of those links lead to pages that no longer exist.

This document will be expanded to include new sources of map data as we find them. For now, sorry, it's a little spare. Note also that most of this information is currently only for the United States, because that's where the guy who wrote it lives. We would be absolutely delighted to include information from your neck of the woods --- please provide it.

• US data sources

  • The US Census Bureau maintains a large collection of nation-wide, state-wide, and county-wide shapefiles of various sorts, including detailed road maps. These are the modern TIGER/Line files. Xastir comes with a set of DBFAWK files pre-rolled for use with the 2025 edition TIGER/Line data for roads, rivers/lakes, landmarks, urban areas and cities, and railroads. These make excellent off-line map layers in the US.
  • The National Weather Service shapefiles used for Weather Alerts can be downloaded using the get-NWSdata script, but can also be found along with helpful descriptions at the NWS GIS data download page
  • Some United States Geological Survey data may be obtained from the National Map Downloader Some of this data is already in formats Xastir can read (shapefile and GeoTIFF), but much of the recent data is in more modern formats like GeoPDF or GeoPackage data sets. These require conversion to use with Xastir (see Map Converters)
  • Still more data may be available at the USGS Earth Explorer site. Much of this data requires conversion except for historical data. There's a lot of data here, but access requires an account, and downloading it might cost money.
  • Current FAA aviation charts in GeoTIFF format can be downloaded from the FAA digital VFR charts site. These maps must be warped into EPSG:4326 geographic coordinates before you can use them in Xastir. See Advanced Map Topics.

• International sources

  • Worldwide offline shapefile coverage can be had from the Geofabrik site. These are shapefile conversions of OpenStreetMap data, and are generally updated daily according to the site.

    We have dbfawks for the roads, waterways, water and natural area features, and buildings layers from this site. Other shapefiles included in the zip files won't render nicely. We may expand our collection of rendering hints for the other files as time allows.

    You might have a few clicks before you find what you need

    If you look at this site and it has an "X" where you would expect a shapefile download link to be, it means that the area pertaining to that region is so big that the shapefiles are broken up into smaller zones. Click on the name of the region instead, and drill down into subregions until you find an actual link to a shapefile (".shp.zip") download.
    These dbfawks are optimized using data from the US

    With our dbfawk rendering hints, the geofabrik files look quite good when applied to shapefile layers in the United States. We have found, though, that for some countries the shapefiles render with unfortunate problems in the labeling, or are so huge they take a long time to render, even when zoomed in close.

    Furthermore, Xastir is not yet been coded to draw map labels properly when the shapefile has UTF-8 encoded fields, as they do in many countries (and even in some places in the US).

    At the moment there's no work-around for the labeling issues, but the slow rendering may be addressed by chopping up the shapefiles into smaller areas using OGR tools. See Advanced Map Topics for links to programs that can help you do that.