Now available on CRAN is a revised version of the shapefiles package for reading and writing shapefiles in R. New additions, courtesy of others, include the ability to convert a simple R data frame of points, polylines or polygons to a shp format list, which can then be written out to a shapefile with write.shp. There is also a function to convert the read.shp shp format list to a simple data frame as well. In addition, there is a basic implementation of the Douglas-Peucker polyline (and polygon) simplification routine. Also, through the help of others, there is now the ability to read and write polyline Z and polygon Z format shapefiles. The read.dbf and write.dbf functions in the foreign library are now used for dbf I/O, which significantly improves the speed. There are probably a few bugs in there that I did not catch, so please email me if you find them. Thanks. Ben Stabler Project Manager PTV America, Inc. 1128 NE 2nd St, Suite 204 Corvallis, OR 97330 541-754-6836 x205 541-754-6837 fax <http://www.ptvamerica.com/> www.ptvamerica.com [[alternative HTML version deleted]]