Thanks for answering everything Rob. The trail charts I meant were USGS topos so there's no copyright issue just like the NOAA charts. They do show trails in them for hiking and they are a great resource for outdoors maps and inland lakes charts. Along those lines, there are also Army Corps of Engineers IENC's in S-57 format which would require some type of conversion using gdal/ogr, etc.

I'd love to experiment with your perl scripts. I'm rusty in perl but this is interesting enough to get me messing around with it again!

By the way, why are you moving to Java with it?

Finally, I tried really hard to make HarborFinder mess up around Alaska. It's working fine today. That's the way it always goes...

If I find anything reproducible, I'll give specific information about it. Sorry for raising the alarm.