FE 'tkGooies' system
'MAPtools' group
COUNTRY OUTLINE FILES
(in a simple ASCII text format ---
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A reduced-size PNG image file of the country Turkey. One of many hi-res image files that are made from very high-resolution outline data at gadm.org. |
! Note !
More links to sources of COUNTRY outline data
(in ASCII-text format) may be added ---
as 'MAPtools' scripts are tested and developed
for the FE 'tkGooies' subsystem.
Some of these data files may be replaced by
files with better data --- and some high-resolution
files may be added as alternatives to low-res files.
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INTRODUCTION : The following 'country outline files' were created from KMZ (or GeoJSON) files using a rather tedious process --- such as the following for KMZ files:
Various Data Resolutions For each country, there may be several outline files (below) of different 'resolutions'. The filename of each file includes the number of lines in the file. That number is an indication of the number of data lines (point definitions) in each file --- and includes number of comment lines. The more lines in the file, the more data points. More data points means that a plot of the sequences of points will (usually) yield a map outline with more detail. --- Note that you can estimate the number of points that you will need to get a high-quality outline of the country. Nowadays, the maps are often rendered on a display screen with a resolution of about 1024 x 768 pixels or 1920 x 1080 pixels --- with the resolution trending upward year by year. Let us take the case of a 1024 x 768 pixel computer monitor. Say we want to render a map in a web browser window on that display. If the user has the web browser window maximized, a map of about 800 x 600 pixels would probably fit nicely within the margins of the web browser viewport. If we are dealing with a map of a country that is rather rectangular in shape and with about an 8-to-6 aspect ratio, then --- if there are not a lot of inlets/jaggies along the borders of that country --- we would need a maximum of about 800 + 600 + 800 + 600 = 1600 + 1200 = 2800 points around the border of the country --- to give a really accurate rendering of the border on the monitor screen. Actually, that would usually be overkill. If we had point coordinates about every 4 pixels around the border, and we connected those points with straight line segments, we would probably find that we get a quite good-looking map. So about 2800 / 4 = 700 points might give a pretty good map. On the other hand, if there are a lot of jaggies around the periphery of the country (lots of inlets and/or peninsulas, say), we may need up to around 10,000 points to get a 'fine-grained' map image --- like the image at the top of this page. In summary, for outline maps of countries, we will probably want to use from a few hundred to about 10,000 points to draw outline maps. Note that for country-files which include borders of interior entities such as states, provinces, or counties, then more than 10,000 points may be required for good definition of all the borders --- say 50,000 or 80,000 points. In the map files below, we may eventually want to have several file 'resolutions' for each country --- 'crude', 'good', and 'excellent' files --- say about 200 points, 1500 points, and 10 thousand points, respectively. (And more points for those files that contain state/province/county borders.) --- Note that you can easily estimate the file sizes --- in kilobytes --- of each of these crude, good, and excellent files --- from the number of points in the file. If each number in the file is expressed to about 10 significant digits, that means that there are about 23 characters in each data line of the file (counting 2 decimal points and a space or comma separating the 2 numbers). Then the file sizes will be
Data 'Loops' Some maps may contain outline 'loops' --- representing islands --- or bodies of water (like lakes). The loops are indicated in the data files by a blank or comment line between sequences of data lines. A comment line is indicated by a '#' character in column one of a file line.
Presentation of the files The files (following) are offered in alphabetical order by country name. The following 'table of contents' (table of links) offers a way to quickly jump to a section of countries starting with the same first letter. You can either
Lists of countries Here is a list of over 250 country/administrative-area names. There are 'outline-data' files below for a majority of these names. Here is an alternative list of countries (and 'administrative areas') --- about 250 --- with their longitude-latitude location. When the border data of countries are gathered together to do a plot of the Earth's countries, usually the data from no more than about 180 countries is used. (Many countries/administrative-areas consist of small islands or a very small land area.) Here is a list of those ~180 countries gathered into regions of Earth. |
TABLE OF CONTENTS:(links to sections of this page, below)
(The files are in alphabetic order by
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A
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C |
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D
E
F
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H
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J
K
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A plot of an 85-thousand-line
USA-with-State-Borders file above
--- using an 'Add 360 to negative longitudes'
option to handle Aleutian islands
with longitudes near both minus-179 degrees
and plus-179 degrees.
Alaska appears bloated because we are plotting
with longitude lines parallel in a plane,
when really the longitude lines converge
as they approach the north pole.
One way of looking at this is that each
10degree-by-10degree longitude-and-latitude
square really should be a trapezoid --- to
achieve an image that is close to 'area-preserving'.
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A test plot of the 25-thousand line
'WholeEarth' file above, using the
tkReadOutlineFile_ drawOutlineOnCanvas
'tkGooie'.
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SAMPLE SEARCHES
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Page was created 2016 Nov 10.
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