I've acquired a recent interest in GIS and do not know of much support in drawing maps/boundaries/locations within LaTeX. pst-geo
provides some mapping features, specifically at the PostScript level. I'm interested in creating something more open/available in the form of boundary files that have easily accessible latitude/longitude coordinates for the boundaries/shapes, similar to what KML files provide. However, I can see how this could easily blow out of proportion when considering the entire globe (jurisdictions within jurisdictions within jurisdictions, ...)
As time goes by, more and higher detail data would probably become available, increasing the size of the data sets.
I'm looking for answers to the following:
- What is the best way to tackle this, specifically in terms of its location on CTAN?
- I think it would be unreasonable to require an installation of the entire data set on a user's computer. How would one require users to install large datasets in a piece-meal fashion?
- Would all of it be hosted on CTAN, or do I need to host the large "external" data sets on a server of my own?
Here are my thoughts on this:
- Create some base-level package, say
gis-maps
; Allow users to load modules, perhaps specific to a country using
\usepackage[italy,south-africa,canada]{gis-maps}
or
\usepackage{gis-maps} \gissetup{maps={italy,south-africa,canada},...}
that would load a load a list of helper-macros specific to those jurisdictions. For example, based on country codes, the above might create something like
\drawITA
,\drawZAF
and\drawCAN
(amongst a host of other macros, perhaps based on some geographical hierarchy).- The above modules would also load the coordinates of the boundaries.
- The base package and modules might be big, but still manageable. However, the data sets themselves would be very large. So one would include instructions on how to add these to your distribution as a manual addition, perhaps to a location like
texmf-local
. I don't know how this would work...
Stay calm, I won't be including any treasure maps...
getnonfreefonts
so one can download maps on demand. – egreg Dec 24 '13 at 20:39