@ Permana: Yes, we’d like to include additional layers / detail in Natural Earth as long as it is at the 10m or more generalized scales. Cultural (population, transportation, etc) as just as welcome as “natural” themes. I’ll follow up with you via email.
@ AridOcean: We’ll be adding the ISO and other codes onto the admin-0 files in an update later this month to make thematic mapping easier. Thanks for the suggestion.
For the admin-0 the columns with the administrative names of the countries are in the Subunit, MapUnit, Country, and Sov columns. Do those load into your system? A forthcoming update will include more thematic data for each admin-0 feature.
Great idea, Frax! We’ll have a look at adding the historic population numbers as attributes on the NE populated places.
As you note, you have different city selections most notably in China, India, and Africa. We can accommodate this in a variety of ways and will use it to revise our cities there. Likely we’d only take a selection of cities in that area and provide the rest at a different, optional scale rank (like 9 and 10 instead of the current 
as our scale ranks are largely based on ability to label features, not purely population. Thanks!
Try replacing these for the 10m and 50m world files respectively (thanks Hans!):
0.01666666666667
0.00000000000000
0.00000000000000
-0.01666666666667
-179.99166666666667
89.99166666666667
=====================
0.03333333333333
0.00000000000000
0.00000000000000
-0.03333333333333
-179.98333333333333
89.98333333333333
Do other layers like the rivers import for you? I don’t have any experience with GeoDjango 
The admin_0 and admin_1 are tough eggs to crack. The topology is a little messy right now. We hope to have that fixed in January.
Can you provide the latitude longitude extent that Quantum / GDAL thinks the raster image has? If it does not start at -180, 90 (but rather something like -180.xxxxxx, 90.yyyyyyyy) then it is likely the GeoTIFF problem. There is a way to over write the extents. You want it to read -180 and 180 on left right and 90 and -90 on top and bottom. The developer of the software we used to write out the GeoTIFFs is still looking into the problem and with the holidays in the US, this prob. won’t be resolved for another week or two. If you can read in the .TWF and use those coordinates instead, you’ll be good.
Congrats on getting back into mapping!
Can you post a screenshot of the problem area? It will help in diagnosis.
You could be suffering from a known issue with the GeoTIFF having a slight offset in the tag registration versus the .TWF registration. Or you could be using the wrong ellipsoids.
Hey Max. Yes, I’m seeing the same error. Latitude1 = latitude (y location). It appears that Long (longitude or x location) became corrupted in final GIS processing. Good news is that the data points are correctly located, they just have the wrong attribute value. I’ll fix that for 1.1 update (field name and attribute values). Thanks!
Thanks, Hugh! We might consider adding this but as you point out, only the very largest river systems towards their mouths should receive this treatment at our scale. Do you have a good source for this? In the meantime, you can approximate this by taking the smallest scale ranks (largest rivers) and outlining their width tapering and applying a fill and stroke to them.
Matt,
I had a look at the SHP file you sent, Matt, and I agree Natural Earth should be using these new boundaries. They conform to the physographic regions better and are at the right level of generalization. I also note that there is sometimes new features in this new SHP file that NE doesn’t have now but should.
I’ll take some time after the holidays and adjust the NE boundaries to match these and add the new features in (like the White Mountains in New England).
Thanks!
Also, by mid January I should have cleaned the geometry on several of the other polygons files in Natural Earth so it’s easier to import into GeoDjango and other more strict geo database apps.
@ Philipp: Yes, I would like to incorporate GeoNames feature IDs on all Natural Earth features. Yes, please try creating an app that imports from both sources! Preserve the original NE feature IDs so we can bring your linkages back into the main data branch. I’ve also reached out to Yahoo! GeoID folks, I’d like to get both, will do wonders for semantic web. I’m also curious about GeoNames as they seem to link to Wikipedia. Is that hard coded or softcoded in their DB? Might be nice to get that as well as the GeoNames ID.
Please describe more: I would need altitude numbers globally. Do you mean elevations above sea level or something else? Is this important for matching with GeoNames? Thanks!
Ed, We’ve heard back from the software developer who’s now investigating. I’m seeing the same error as you in ArcGIS.
Why is the admin-0 linework coming in jagged without as much detail as the original? Look at the Gulf of California where the Colorado outflows. The river no longer touches the shoreline. Maybe use the 50m shapes instead?
You might also try using the scale rank attributes in the admin-1 to do a “Larger states” and “smaller states” split instead of east-west. That attribute is present in all themes to allow filtering out features by map zoom level
@ Philipp: I’ve since run a “Repair Geometry” routine on the admin-1 that should remove some of these errors. You can find that beta file here:
http://www.nacis.org/naturalearth/temp/10m_admin_1_version1b1.zip
Let me know if this new file imports for you.
_Nathaniel
Sure, send it along to nathaniel@naturalearthdata.com. We try to use consistent measure and density around the world so I’ll sort thru and see how it compares and use it to adjust our boundaries at a minimum. Thanks!
Can you set the physical area labels to no fill like the marine label areas? The boundaries all overlap because of the various scale ranks and they are meant to guide label placement only in this version (the edges need work still).
@ MattFox: This is great! I’m loving the marine labels in particular. Thanks for sharing 
How can we make it faster? It lags a bit on my new Mac using newer version of GE Pro. Is this a server issue or?
