[Graham Asher]

Natural Earth data is unprojected degrees of latitude and longitude using the WGS84 datum.

Judging by your image, one map is projected using the Mercator projection while the other is probably projected using the (very bad) Plate Carrée projection, which converts lat/long in a linear fashion to y and x coordinates.

I advise looking up those projections in Wikipedia.

[Graham Asher]

The trouble is, it seems (based on a bug report I made a long time ago) that the Natural Earth input scripts which are used to prepare the data ignore any character outside the ASCII range.

I pointed out this bug but was told (I think) that there was no easy way to fix it, which must surely be wrong. I now can’t find my bug report, but I found a note here (https://www.naturalearthdata.com/blog/natural-earth-version-1-4-release-notes/) that one of my suggestions had been implemented – but not, it seems, the general solution.

So somehow we have to persuade Natural Earth to accept the existence of non-ASCII characters in placenames.

[Author]

Posts