SHP Viewer

SHP Viewer is a simple shapefile viewer. The Esri Shapefile or simply a shapefile is a popular geospatial vector data format for geographic information systems (GIS). A shapefile is a digital vector storage format for storing geometric location and associated attribute information. This format lacks the capacity to store topological information.

• Esri shapfile viewer and reader

View in Mac App Store

Glossary

Shapefile

A shapefile is a digital vector storage format for storing geometric location and associated attribute information.

Shapefile data format

A "shapefile" is actually a set of several files

Mandatory files :

.shp - shape format; the feature geometry itself
.shx - shape index format; a positional index of the feature geometry to allow seeking forwards and backwards quickly
.dbf - attribute format; columnar attributes for each shape, in dBase IV format

Optional files :

.prj - projection format; the coordinate system and projection information, a plain text file describing the projection using well-known text format
.sbn and .sbx - a spatial index of the features
.fbn and .fbx - a spatial index of the features for shapefiles that are read-only
.ain and .aih - an attribute index of the active fields in a table or a theme's attribute table
.ixs - a geocoding index for read-write shapefiles
.mxs - a geocoding index for read-write shapefiles (ODB format)
.atx - an attribute index for the .dbf file in the form of shapefile.columnname.atx (ArcGIS 8 and later)
.shp.xml - geospatial metadata in XML format, such as ISO 19115 or other schemas
.cpg - used to specify the code page (only for .dbf) for identifying the character encoding to be used

System Requirements

User Guide