User:Maproom

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[edit] Maps

I would like to try to help Wikipedia by uploading maps that will be useful. I can create them first where necessary, but this takes far more effort.

My gallery contains some scans which I have uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in response to requests at one of

I have tried to make their existence know, by using the CommonSense tool and by adding statements to the talk pages of the articles that might want to use them. So far no-one has used them, so maybe I am doing it wrong, or maybe scanned images like those aren't useful.

Some of the maps that I most admire in Wikimedia are these:

I am capable of making images like those myself, using PaintShopPro, but it takes me a very long time. If anyone has advice on ways of speeding up the process of creating "clean" digital maps like those above from scans, I will be grateful.

[edit] Formats for maps

The first of the maps above is an svg file, the others are png files. I am considering learning how to use Inkscape so as to be able to create such maps in a scalable format, probably svg.

Some benefits of svg are that it is scalable, and looks nice, and can be used to create pngs which are small enough to be used in Wikipedia articles. I am puzzled by the way my browsers behave when I actually give them svg files to render. On my fairly standard Windows system, if I try to view the first image in the gallery above in a browser,

  • with IE: the placenames are all readable but there are no scrollbars, so I can only see the north-west quarter of the map. It is very slow to download.
  • with FireFox: there are scrollbars, but the smaller placenames are unreadable. It is very slow to download.

For presenting large detailed scanned maps, for my own purposes, I like Zoomify. Those images are easy for me to create, and easy for the users to use. They can scroll the image, zoom in on any part of it, and read all the placenames if they zoom in far enough. It doesn't really download fast, but it gives the impression of doing so, because it quickly downloads the parts you see at first, and downloads the zoomed-in images only when you zoom in.

But Zoomify is only really appropriate for maps like the ones in my gallery, which are just scans; it is not suitable for "clean" maps like the images above.