Maps 2

The current state of mapping efforts.

BlueMarble projections

I tried making some better-looking maps. In dimensions where scaling was linear, Lanczos3 brought pretty decent results. In other dimensions, it sucked, making a map blurred. There's probably some math behind it - $\mathrm {sinc} (x+k)$ and $\mathrm {sinc} (x+m)$ ($m\neq k$) are orthogonal over $(-\infty ,\infty )$ with $w(x)=1$. This is not necessarily the case for different weighting function. And non-zero scalar product = blurred results.

• cylindrical equidistant - linear in both dimensions, transforms for each dimension independent
• cylindrical equalarea - linear in one dimension, transforms for each dimension independent
• cylindrical Mercator - linear in one dimension, transforms for each dimension independent
• azimuthal - nonlinear in both dimensions, transforms for each dimension not independent

Other problems

1. no decent library that would do all the graphics, especially the font-related graphics.
2. no decent country label placement
3. city data doesn't specify which X is "the X" and which is "just some village that happens to be called X too"
4. country borders are not up-to-date and politically correct
5. rivers data is buggy
6. not enough sub-country administrative divisions data

Relations between problems:

• 2 can't be solved until 1 is solved
• 3,4,5 possible to do by hand with quite a bit of effort
• no idea how to fix 6