View source for 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 - <math>\mathrm{sinc}(x+k)</math> and <math>\mathrm{sinc}(x+m)</math> (<math>m\ne k</math>) are orthogonal over <math>(-\infty,\infty)</math> with <math>w(x)=1</math>. 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 ===

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

[[category:wikimaps history]]