# Best Way of Handling Shapefiles in Makie

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/best-way-of-handling-shapefiles-in-makie/71028>\
**Category:** Visualization\
**Tags:** plotting, visualization, makie, shapefile\
**Created:** [November 5, 2021, 9:17pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/best-way-of-handling-shapefiles-in-makie/71028 "2021-11-05T21:17:28Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 4

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**Author:** ![juliohm](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/juliohm/32/215266_2.png) [@juliohm](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/juliohm)\
**Post date:** [November 6, 2021, 12:18pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/best-way-of-handling-shapefiles-in-makie/71028/4 "2021-11-06T12:18:30Z")

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Alternatively, you can rely on the infrastructure surrounding the [GeoStats.jl](https://github.com/JuliaEarth/GeoStats.jl) project. You can load the shapefile using [GeoTables.jl](https://github.com/JuliaEarth/GeoTables.jl) and it will produce geometries from the [Meshes.jl](https://github.com/JuliaGeometry/Meshes.jl) project. Then you can use the [MeshViz.jl](https://github.com/JuliaGeometry/MeshViz.jl) recipes for Makie to visualize any kind of geospatial domain. The good thing about this solution is that it has a lot of options to color the boundaries of states, the polygons, vertices, etc. Special attention must be given to the `decimation` option, which is still needed currently to simplify polygons with thousands of vertices that are available on the internet, such as the polygons from the GADM project.

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