[Nathaniel]

Oops, still not working. Let me tinker.

[Nathaniel]

@holgerschurig: Sorry about that. bbPress is from the same folks as WordPress but not quite as industrial strength. I’ve added a new plugin for the previews, hope it works.

[Nathaniel]

The current 1.0 version does not have that as an attribute. The 1.1 version to be released soon does. In the meantime, here’s how to calculate that using ArcMap Field Calculator VBA prelogic:

dim Output as double

dim pGeom as IGeometry

set pGeom = [shape]

Output = pGeom.Envelope.XMin

Then put Output in the 2nd text field in the field calculator dialog and complete dialog.

[Nathaniel]

@Pangloss: We’ll have better admin-0 out with thematic codes (ISO, FIPS, etc) added on soon. The admin-1 are one of the better ones out there at this scale, but the coding still needs some work. Please let us know any errors you find.

[Nathaniel]

We break our linework up into sections to get that effect. If they are broken on straight line sections, this is “good enough”. Often is just needs to be done at the headwaters to get the right look. Brushes will improve with time.

[Nathaniel]

@Pangloss: No need to update to the new version which mostly has edits to make it work better with the new 1:10,000,000 land/ocean mask. If you do use the new linework, it is recommended you use the new raster to be in register, though.

For pixel conversions at zoom level:

Each succeeding zoom level divides the map into 4 N tiles, where N refers to the zoom level. For example, at zoom level 1, Google Maps divides the world up into a 2×2 grid for a total of 4 tiles; at zoom level 2, Google Maps divides up the world into a 4×4 grid for a total of 16 tiles, etc.

(http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/overlays.html#MapTypeZoomLevels)

Zoom 6: (2^6 * 256)

16k pixels.

New Natural Earth is 21,600 x 10,800 so between zoom 6 and 7. Raster scales up pretty well, so when I say zoom 7, it scales up fine to the linework which looks good at zoom 7 but is getting inaccurate (blurry in raster terms) at zoom 8.

Zoom 7: 32k pixel width total (2^7 * 256)

128 tiles wide and tall * 256 pixels per tile = 32k width total.

Zoom 8: (2^8 * 256)

256 tiles wide and tall * 256 pixels per tile = 65k width total.

Someone check me?

http://www.maptiler.org/google-maps-coordinates-tile-bounds-projection/

[Nathaniel]

@Alfreddj: Thanks, glad you’re finding Natural Earth useful!

We have a general naming policy here:

Map Feature Name Guidelines

https://www.naturalearthdata.com/about/map-update-committee/

That will explain why some features are in conventional English versus local language names. Upper case is when a feature is large. This is a standard cartography convention in print.

We’re about to release a new version that includes GeoNames.org IDs on all our towns so people can make use of the multiple languages they’ve collected. The same solution might work for Physical features. For towns, we also have a display name, a parenthetical name (an alt name that the feature is well known by), and alt names. Perhaps the same would be helpful on the Physical features.

If you’d like to spearhead that work, I can set you up.

[Nathaniel]

@Rongcon1: The most detailed line work in Natural Earth is designed for 1:10,000,000 (10 million) scale mapping but looks decent until 4 million. That equates to zoom 7 in the Google maps model.

How Can You Tell What Map Scales Are Shown For Online Maps? (ESRI)

http://kelsocartography.com/blog/?p=2407

You’re going to be hard pressed to get good linework at zoom 13 (which is just better than 1:100,000 scale). In the US you could use the map series built at that scale. But your talking a large (in file size) dataset and not global coverage and out of date info.

I don’t have experience with World Wind. Anyone else jump in?

[Nathaniel]

This is done.

[Nathaniel]

@Hugo: I was able to get 96% (all but 22) to match pretty well. The remainder are in China and India and looks like we’ll need to add new towns in Natural Earth for ~18 of them. Trying to disambiguate the remainder with their dopplegangers. The positional accuracy of the “world-database-of-large-cities” is courser (less accurate) than Natural Earth so we’ll need to research the correct lat-lng to use on add. Do you have time for that? If so, I can send you a SHP file of these. Please email me at nathaniel@naturalearthdata.com.

[Nathaniel]

Hey Hugo! I’m almost done integrating new populated places from North America and we can apply some of that same place-matching logic to your historical statistics file. Let’s email off forum to make this happen.

[Nathaniel]

Yes, Lac a l’ Eau Claire has one. There are also sometimes commas (,) in the names.

Also O. Nerpich’ye

L. Il’men’

O. Bol’shoye Morskoye

Might be more, those are the ones I see at first glance.

[Nathaniel]

Should be Western European Windows 1252. Can you post screenshots of the corrupted text (how it looks on your system) with FID and lake name in text (pasted here) to help with troubleshooting, please?

[Nathaniel]

@ loffenauer: The original files have the full ±90 extent. When you import them raw in geographic original projection, do you see the missing area? Sometimes web Mercator clips the top and bottom since the distortion is so extreme in the higher latitudes. Perhaps there is a setting in GDAL to preserve these areas? Cool! What OSM rending will this be included in?

[Nathaniel]

Great to hear it worked out for you

[Nathaniel]

You might try one of the software packages mentioned here:

http://freegeographytools.com/category/software

[Nathaniel]

Please try this file:

http://www.nacis.org/naturalearth/temp/NE1_LR_LC_SR_GEOTIFF.zip

There is a world file, but you shouldn’t need that.

[Nathaniel]

A little more background: the world file (TFW) that comes with the TIF does not specify the projection as WGS84 geographic. It does set the upper-left corner and the cell size. Se either the wrong world file (maybe for the High-res?) is being used but that TIF doesn’t have enough pixel width to make up for it. The GeoTIF option includes projection and cell registration all in one single file. I hope this solves your problem! If so, we’ll roll out GeoTiff versions of all raster imagery in Natural Earth.

[Nathaniel]

I’ll post a GeoTIFF version of the NE1_LR_LC_SR file for you momentarily to see if that fixes the problem for you.

[Nathaniel]

@ The Sunburned Surveyor: We’re manually making edits right now but it’s possible to set-up a SVN repository if edits pick up.

Tom is most the way thru getting a National Parks theme for the US up and running. I don’t think that includes national forest or other “park-like” boundaries. Let me connect the two of you

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