How do I convert geojson and shp files to topojson files using gdal?

Question

I have successfully installed Python and GDAL with guidance from this link Installation instructions

I've seen some web tools that can convert to and fro the formats I mentioned above. I decided to install ogr2ogr locally. I need some simple instructions to bring up the command tool and convert my files. Most important is the switch to preserve properties or id of the geometries.

Answer 1

According to the GDAL webpage for the GeoJSON driver , GDAL supports reading TopoJSON as of OGR 1.11. It says nothing about writing TopoJSON, so I am assuming writing is not supported.

From the TopoJSON readme , the binary geo2topo will convert GeoJSON to TopoJSON in-place . It looks like that is the tool you should be using, not ogr2ogr .

The workflow would therefore be as follows:

shapefile translated to GeoJSON with ogr2ogr
GeoJSON updated to TopoJSON with geo2topo