State of the Vector Map, Part 2: The Next Generation

Maps Shireroth's land and interacts with the worldwide Micronational Cartography Society.

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Shyriath
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State of the Vector Map, Part 2: The Next Generation

Post by Shyriath »

Putting up a new thread, since the old one is filling up a bit.

But it's also a good time to do it, because I think the vector map is going to be moving into a new phase. In the coming days I will be uploading a new production map, which will have most of the nations of Micras on it, and once the remainder are completed I will be able to start on cities and military bases.

But there is also going to be a further change, not in the map itself so much as the process used to create it.

I have, thus far, been using CorelDRAW X4 and X5 for my work. CorelDRAW is, in its own way, a powerful program, and an easy one to work with; I like it. But for some time now I have had several concerns relating to its use. File formats, for example: working in the native .cdr format is easy enough, and the format has a low file size for a vector format, but presents compatibility difficulties. Exporting to .svg, which is more widely used, is possible, but the results are wildly unsatisfactory, as are the results of taking .svg files and attempting to edit them in CorelDRAW.

Then, too, there have been technical difficulties. CorelDRAW has sometimes been fidgety in its behavior, generally in ways that can be fixed, but occasionally for no discernible reason at all (as with the contour tool debacle). And the production process, too, suffers from certain flaws in program design, one of the biggies being that there seems to be no convenient way to give anything some kind of transparency (a feature that would make it much, much easier to see what's going on in multiple layers simultaneously.

In short, I am becoming increasingly convinced that, despite the considerable short-term hardships involved, a migration to a different file format and a different program will be for the ultimate benefit of the mapping project. I exported the latest state of the map to the .svg format, and am in the laborious process of cleaning it up; although the shapes and curves themselves are mostly intact, there will need to be a good amount of repositioning. Since the conversion also entirely lost the system of layers I had made, I will also have to recreate all of them and separate the various shapes out into their proper layers. There will also have to be some aesthetic adjustments as far as line widths and colors to get some things looking like they should again.

Once this is done, however, it will open up some new advantages. One is that use of .svg as the native format means that the vector files will be better-constructed. Also, the relatively widespread use of the format and its increasing amount of support in modern browsers will make it easier both to view the map files and to find tools to edit them with. In particular, Inkscape, which is free of charge, can be used for this purpose without having to acquire expensive software, either through purchase or by *ahem* other methods. Inkscape also already has some use in Shireroth in the form of CJ, who I believe is using it for his work in coats of arms. And aside from being free, Inkscape has some other features which may be of potential use, and which hopefully will prove less problematic than CorelDRAW's.

We'll see what happens...
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Harvey Steffke
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Re: State of the Vector Map, Part 2: The Next Generation

Post by Harvey Steffke »

Well reasoned, but don't burn yourself out from overexertion. Lotta people here really pulling for this project to succeed. :)

Shyriath
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Location: Sunderspray, Shireroth
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Re: State of the Vector Map, Part 2: The Next Generation

Post by Shyriath »

There are other things I may burn out from, but not this (at the moment). :p I'm taking it in steps.

The migration to the SVG file is actually mostly complete now; most of my current confusion is related to the way Inkscape handles the flood-fill tool. If you have paths bordering a space that you want to fill, Inkscape won't just fill the entire space; it seems to want to either fill it only approximately or not at all, and which it picks seems to depend on how close you're zoomed in (and neither option is suitable for what I'm doing). I'm not quite sure how to get around that yet.
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