[Nathaniel]

@Damien: Glad you like Natural Earth!

ScaleRank is a curated list of rivers that are regionally important at each “zoom” of the map. When the map is zoomed in more, more rivers should show. These integer values allow you to quickly throttle the amount of content visible. They are partly based on river discharge, but moderated a good bit to make sure there is balanced coverage.

StrokeWeight is a curated appearance guide for how thick to make the river stroke in points. River mouths should be thicker than their headwaters. Bigger rivers (more discharge) should have thicker mouths than minor rivers.

[Nathaniel]

Natural Earth is not meant to be a detailed dataset. It only is accurate to 1:10,000,000 scale. World Vector Shorelines or a similar product is surely a better choice if you need that level of detail.

[Nathaniel]

There are several online map services that use Natural Earth. But there are no plans at this time to have a WMS or WFS on the main site.

Try: maps.stamen.com

[Nathaniel]

Can you elaborate? Is this for admin-1 boundaries? Do you have a news article, links to new maps, data?

[Nathaniel]

In the layer properties window, general tab, query builder: you can make a filter for all the features visible.

If you want to set sizes based on scaleRanks, use the Labels tab there, Label based on “name”. You can use other features there to setup sized by class.

[Nathaniel]

@priscellie: Welcome!

1. Filtering: use the “scaleRank” attributes. They are numbers from 0 to 9. Smaller values are more important than larger values.

2. Label placement: You can use a combination of scaleRank or population (there are a few columns, use pop_max) to get the text sizing. QGIS has some auto label options. The advanced label engine with the ABC on a diagonal blue line in the toolbar is your best bet (better than the layer properties auto label). The images on the site were custom made in Adobe Illustrator, a pro graphics design tool. An open source peer is Inkscape.

3. Have fun!

[Nathaniel]

The HUGE lakes are punched out of the admin, but the mid-size and small lakes are not. In North America this would be the great lakes. This is so you don’t always have to layer lakes with the admin to achieve “holes” between certain countries. Off the top of my head I think it’s lakes with scaleRank <= 2?

[Nathaniel]

@Josep, The PopMax field should be used for most things. The PopMin field is for when you’re mapping at more detailed scale and you want to differentiate between, say, San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose in the same metropolitan region and all of those cities are shown in Natural Earth. These figures are metro area population estimates. They are not the sizes of the actual administration / jurisdiction / incorporated area with that name.

[Nathaniel]

Yep, disputed area. It’s the line of control between Morocco and the Western Saharans. It’ll be a little clearer in the new 1.5 release.

[Nathaniel]

The 10m admin-0 scaleRanks should have eastern and western Russia to your liking. Also, the Physical Label Areas have approximate areas for the continents.

_Nathaniel

[Nathaniel]

scaleRank in all Natural Earth themes indicates at what scale (zoom) the feature should appear on the map.

See: http://kelsocartography.com/blog/?p=2407

With the caveat that NE has a scaleRank that equates to 1:50,000,000 that puts the sequence 1 out of order mid way thru.

For most features, the zoom their geometry should be drawn on the map, and the zoom which they should be labeled (or fully labeled versus abbreviated labeled) is the same. For the situations where this is not true, labelRank comes into play. This is more helpful for countries than populated places. If scaleRank is not fully getting you there, pursue labelRank.

Both these attributes are based on relative importance of cities based on a variety of factors. Not purely what type of administrative capital or raw incorporated population. For instance, Washington DC is less than 1 million people, but is the central city for a metro area of over 4 million and is an important world city.

You likely see the labelRank here as an intermediate step I’ve been making to refine the scaleRank values further.

More on attributes: https://www.naturalearthdata.com/forums/topic.php?id=40

[Nathaniel]

You’re likely zooming in past the optimal scale of the Natural Earth data. It’s meant for mapping at the 1:10,000,000 scale maximum which is around zoom 7 on Google Maps:

http://maps.google.com/?ll=37.709899,-79.508057&spn=9.24368,11.052246&t=m&z=7&vpsrc=6

There are other datasets out there if you want to zoom in more. Natural Earth is optimized to be a lightweight dataset compared to those.

Things could always move over, of course. If you want to do that, download QGIS and toggle the editing mode and move the boundaries over a smidge to fit your needs.

[Nathaniel]

Try: http://nationalatlas.gov/mld/countyp.html

Or 2010 census.

[Nathaniel]

the pop_min and pop_max columns are most useful. the others depend on your use. please describe your case more fully.

[Nathaniel]

If your map is that small, you should consider using the 50m NE data, not the 10m data.

_Nathaniel

[Nathaniel]

@David:

In QGIS (available for Mac for free), you can view the extent metadata for the countries SHP:

Extents:

In layer spatial reference system units : xMin,yMin -180,-89.9998 : xMax,yMax 180,83.6338

Not sure how to get that in MP. Don’t see it immediately in my copy.

So if you’re using 1.4, this error shouldn’t be happening. In fact, when I project to Winkel Tripple, I get the expected result. My guess is your page is set to be small (letter?) and when MP imports the data, it rounds out of the ±180/±90 envelope, creating this problem?

I suggest you take it up with MP support and report back here, please.

_Nathaniel

[Nathaniel]

What extents does the NE data show in geographic before you project it? Is it all within the ±90/±180 envelope?

[Nathaniel]

Are you using the latest version 1.4 off the website today?

[Nathaniel]

@Jambudveep: If the Natural Earth raster doesn’t work for you out of the box, you’ll need to start with a DEM (DTM), which is not provided here. Do a web search for your country or use of the SRTM 1 km products.

[Nathaniel]

Try: http://www.vliz.be/vmdcdata/marbound/. They also have a couple other products that would peek your interest: http://vliz.be/vmdcdata/wlist.php?ThemID=12

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