Re: country borders on 2d-world

[Juhász P. <pet...@gm...>]

On Thu, 2015-10-22 at 12:37 -0700, Ethan A Merritt wrote:
> On Thursday, 22 October, 2015 20:47:37 Juhász Péter wrote:
> > On Thu, 2015-10-22 at 00:17 -0500, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
> > > 
> > > Although it isn't a type of plot I'd use in my field, it would be a 
> > > really nice feature given how common this type of geographical "plot" 
> > > with data points is today.  A command syntax is going to be the 
> > > difficult part.  Defining the maps is another issue.  What if boundaries 
> > > change?  Is there some type of universally accepted data format or 
> > > descriptive language for map boundaries these days?
> > > 
> > > Dan
> > > 
> > 
> > Two more issues that count against including high-resolution map data
> > into gnuplot itself:
> > 
> > - licensing
> > - data size
> 
> You may be responding to a message I haven't seen yet, but...
> I don't think Dan's comment implied incorporating the map data itself
> into gnuplot.  The idea, I think, is that if there are standard formats
> for map data we might provide support for these to make it easier to
> read from external files.  Analogous to the way we handle image formats:
>    plot 'foo.png' binary filetype=png
> 
> I don't know whether this would be useful or not.  The external files
> might require so much pre-processing that the syntax of the final plot
> command is not an issue.
> 
> 	Ethan
> 

Well, he didn't imply that, however, the OP wanted a simple way to
produce geographical plots that include country borders. To do that
reliably, you have to have a proven, known dataset. What you are saying
(adding support for one or more of the de facto standard GIS formats) is
only halfway there - and even that raises the question of which
format(s) to support, and to what extent.

IMHO that alone doesn't worth the effort, as it doesn't provide real
benefits compared to the situation that we have now, that is, if you
want to produce nice, detailed maps, you get the data from wherever you
can, in any format you can, you convert it with some external tools to a
format that gnuplot can use, then plot it yourself.

We might turn to systems such as R for inspiration: there the creation
of maps is supported in the form of add-on packages, e.g.
https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/maps/index.html
https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/mapdata/index.html

However, gnuplot does not support add-on packages like that and I think
that's a can of worms we don't want to open right now.

Peter