Jack Erbes wrote:
And the presentation of the details in the navigable water areas on the
S-57 charts has very subtle shadings in the way it depicts markings for
everything from navaids to piers,pilings, awash rocks, and the other
stuff. When I look at a NOAA BSB4 raster chart (or the Navionics
charts) the details sort of leap out at me in comparison.

The entire idea of a vector chart is that it does NOT contain any data
that says how to depict markings such as navaids, unlike a raster chart.
For any navaid it just contains it's type, (geographical) position,
size, height etc. How this is represented is up to the software package
that you use to view the chart.

I've set up my US software package (Nobeltec) such that the vector
charts look like the paper charts that I am used to. This gives me the
'familiarity' that you are looking for as well; wherever I am and
whatever the original source of the charts (UKHO, German, French,
Norwegian). In fact this is much appreciated as on a 3 week trip it's
easy to be in four different countries over here, each with subtly
different paper charts.

I can imagine that you might hate my setup, and would wanna switch to
whatever you are used to. A good software package lets you do that...

Kees