Show HN: A free collection of maps for every country in the world, in 11 sizes | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A free collection of maps for every country in the world, in 11 sizes

github.com

157 pointsrobinhood51 comments

Great effort!

Unfortunately, you're likely to get a bunch of requests for changes since there are a bunch of places where geo-political boundaries are murky at best.

For example, your map for India (https://github.com/djaiss/mapsicon/blob/master/asia/in/1024....) shows the boundary as the line of control with Pakistan and China, instead of the boundary which India claims (based on pre-war demarcations, http://www.mapsofindia.com/images2/india-map.jpg)

Oh man I know. I really struggled for some maps... should I include them or not? It depends on the current world policy, if the world is at peace or at war.

Anyway, for most countries, it's still ok :-)

It'd be a fun project to change political boundaries, location names (Sea of Japan / East Sea), and map orientation (who is at the center?) based on each visitor's geolocation.

The world: according to you.

That's just going to end with one-continent maps for most people.

Google maps already does that. [1]

[1] http://www.menasborders.com/menasborders/news/article/871/Go...

Rule #1 of maps:

There are no unpolitical maps.

If someone uses that map of India in any application or project targeting India, it is bound to attract a sea of protests. I didn't even know about the existence of this map till college and Google. Overwhelming majority of Indians don't know about your map and would likely see it as justifying Pakistani aggression.

Simple solution to such requests: tell them to fork.

The British Library did an amazing exhibition of maps over history with their role in politics and propaganda a while back. My favourite was a bit of middles ages bravado that was about 3x3m, with meticulous detail, showing one country having completely swallowed another, this was was sent to the king of that country as a warning. The book of the exhibition is still available, I highly recommend it. http://www.bl.uk/magnificentmaps/

How is this better than existing projects like Wikimedia’s vector maps?

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:SVG_maps_by_count...

Thanks!

This should have been the post...

I think if you read all the comments you'll realize why you couldn't sell these. They aren't maps, they are riddled with errors, they are not even in a vector scalable format.

Yeah, IMO Natural Earth[0] data is much more valuable, and easy to get into any format one could need. Countries would be covered by the "Admin 0 – Countries" file[1].

[0]http://www.naturalearthdata.com/

[1]http://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/10m-cultural-vecto...

> easy to get into any format one could need

Okay, I'll bite. How would one get these into SVG? I haven't found anything as straightforward as an SHP->SVG converter.

I havent used this, but I've seen it posted a few times on various GIS type places: http://www.duif.net/qgis/simplesvg/

Not sure if this would fit your needs, or if it's any good

open in qgis, select countries, export as svg.

I prefer my maps in SVG. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:SVG_maps_by_count...

I'm not sure that you know what the word map actually means.

This is a free collection of country images, or silhouettes, but only in the loosest possible definition of the term could these be considered maps.

Not trying to belittle your efforts; merely your advertising.

yeah, exactly. I was helping my 6th grader last night on "Earth Science" (scoped at California) and we covered maps and their definition. One of the primary prerequisite for a map is having physical features like rivers, mountains etc.

So, to be clear, you're saying this is not a map: http://cdn.myzipcodemap.com/statemaps/CA.PDF; this is not a map: http://www.tfl.gov.uk/assets/downloads/standard-tube-map.pdf ...

The first one won't load for me. The second is a map, IMO... as it contains "physical features" like the train tubes, wheelchair ramps, bathrooms, etc

That certainly wasn't the definition in my high school geography classes, where we specifically covered maps that featured only political boundaries (and coincidentally, showed continental boundaries). It is also not a definition I could find in Wikipedia,Merriam-Webster, etc just now. Do you have any cites stronger than some 6th grade class?

Maps are just visualizations that focus on one attribute almost everything has: a spatial location. They don't need to show rivers or other physical features. A map of voting patterns for instance doesn't really have physical features. If you distort it to reflect population, you have an even looser map whose only tie to the world is the relative location of one area to another.

Physical maps like those that the USGS provide are just a tiny sample of the breadth of maps out there in the world. There are many, many really cool, non-traditional maps out there.

The map for Austria (https://github.com/djaiss/mapsicon/blob/master/europe/at/102...) doesn't depict Austria, but its state Carinthia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carinthia_(state)).

Otherwise, I like your project and the initiative of open sourcing it. Could be a nice resource for making a geo-quiz or similar.

Sorry for the mistake, will fix this.

Also, the one for gb shows Northern Ireland. Great Britain doesn't include any of the Irish island. That would be the United Kingdom. There's a quick overview showing the differences here: http://resources.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/customs/questi...

Nice work though. I can see a lot of ways these could be useful.

Nope. The ISO3166 code for the United Kingdom is 'gb'.

The icon for VI (US Virgin Islands) shows only one of the three islands (St. Thomas). St. John is incorrectly included with VG (British Virgin Islands), and St. Croix appears to be missing entirely. For a better diagram, see, for example, the US Virgin Islands quarter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2009_USVI_Proof.png

I could nitpick about Florida and North Carolina, too (missing the Keys and the Outer Banks), but those issues seem relatively minor.

Also this isn't Rwanda: https://github.com/djaiss/mapsicon/blob/master/africa/rw/256... (can't figure out yet what is actually is...)

Looks like Saudi Arabia

FYI, tf lacks several territories (it only depicts the main island of Kerguelen) but above all, Asia is probably not the continent I would have chosen for a collection of islands near Antarctica. It's usually (as in timezones, for example) put in an "Indian" group which also includes Madagascar, the Maldives, Mauritius, and other Indian ocean territories.

Another point: it's not actually a list of countries but a list of entities that have iso codes, ie. French overseas departements are listed separately from mainland, except for Corsica.

Looking at the France map, I find that the boundaries are a bit out of shape, as if they were a bit "deflated" (the Ardennes point, Crozon peninsula, or Corsica cape, are very thin lines, and even Normandy looks skinny). I'm not sure why.

I like Pakistan map (https://github.com/djaiss/mapsicon/blob/master/asia/pk/1024....), thanks for adding my country :)

Why not vector format?

Well, I created them one year ago using Fireworks. I didn't understand the importance of saving them in .svg back then. Now I do :-) I'm planning to export all the vectors to Illustrator, then saving them in .svg, then putting them in Github too.

I prefer SVG because of Inkscape. Hopefully you can find separate states / municipals / counties from the original file I submitted...

Turn them into .svg, then load them all into http://icomoon.io/app/, and release it as an icon font set.

That's been done years ago http://www.dafont.com/geobats.font

You didn't seriously trace all maps in Fireworks, did you? Do you realize you can download shapefiles for all countries from multiple places on the net, and then render them at all desired sizes and styles with an afternoon worth of programming?

Yeah - I've been really dumb on this one, I know :-)

There's an issue with Puerto Rico: https://github.com/djaiss/mapsicon/issues/1.

Nicely done!

Minor things, but I was surprised to find Russia in 'Asia' folder. In most cases (sport for example) it's considered Europe.

This, of course, brings us to the question, "What are continents?" [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uBcq1x7P34

Again, depending on the wikipedia article, Russia can be considered in Europe, in Asia or in Eurasia. So tricky. Which norm to follow?

If you have distinction between Europe and Asia, you put Russia and some other smaller countries in both. If you have only Eurasia, you don't have problem. You don't put Europe, Asia and Eurasia in one flat classification, because Eurasia includes Europa and Asia.

Any chance you could build a 2013-ready (flat?) version of timezonepicker.com ?

Why not vector/SVG?

MY only shows peninsula Malaysia - missing the Borneo States...

I don't see Alaska and Hawaii in the namerica / us

as a chinese, I don't understand why you make China and Taiwan separately.

Because I based this work on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1 and they list this as a separate entity.

Probably because they are two different countries for all intents and purposes, and from the point of view of most of the world except for mainland China.

The fact that Taiwan citizens need a (kind of) visa to enter mainland China is also a clear message that they aren't citizens of the same country.

Any other claim is political bullshit.

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