onthegomap/planetiler

[FEATURE] Built-in Natural Earth profile

Opened this issue · 3 comments

It would be cool to include a profile showcasing all of the vector layers available in Natural Earth

Some issues I ran into prototyping this:

  • Need to use Natural Earth shapefile instead of sqlite (and deprecate sqlite one since it's redundant) since some data only exists in the shapefile distribution (i.e. bathymetry)
  • Shapefile reader only supports a single .shp file inside a zip, but natural earth is distributed as many .shp files in a single zip file. There's some debug data in there too so need a way to filter to only some .shp files.
  • Shapefile reader needs to support configurable charsets (Natural Earth uses UTF-8)
  • Some named polygons (i.e. Physical Labels) are useless in MapLibre, they need to be converted to centerlines (#13) or centroid labels to be useful
  • Visvalingham-Wyatt simplification would produce better results simplifying geometries at lower zoom levels

@wipfli can you possibly help with bathymetry for example?

Good point. If all you want is bathymetry this is pretty straightforward.