7 replies to this topic

[woneil]

For a book project I need to make small-scale political maps of Europe and especially East Asia and the Western Pacific as they were on the eve of World War II. My preference would be to use Versamap to project and draw the base maps, as it has long served well for such purposes in my work. (The attached map of Europe in 1914 gives an idea of what I'm aiming for.)

My immediate challenge is borders. I did find a set of European borders at Geocommons, but they are problematic in several respects. They are only available in Shapefile or KML form and I need to be able to import them into Excel to make files in Versamap format. There is a KMLCSV Converter, but it does not appear to work for Geocommons files. And if I got them in Excel I would need to reduce the number of vectors by four-fifths or more to make them compatible with my scale. Finally, I have yet to find any borders for East Asia.

Any suggestions?

Attached Files

•  Europe_1914___300dpi.png   517.55K   18 downloads

[Hans van der Maarel]

I have a set of historical borders (worldwide) for various years, including 1938, which I'd be happy to send to you. I assume they're public domain. I downloaded them from somewhere, can't remember where and there's no notice included re. copyright or whoever created them.

They're shapefiles though, I haven't heard of the Versamap format, so I don't know how easy or difficult it would be to convert them.

[DaveB]

Maybe from here?

[Hans van der Maarel]

Maybe from here?

The years match, so I think that's the source.

[woneil]

Thanks very much to both of you. I installed QGIS (my first experience with it) and loaded the shapefiles. While the outlines are a little too generalized for some of my needs, on the whole this is very helpful indeed. I presume I should have no great difficulty in making the fairly simple base maps I want using QGIS.

Versamap is/was a very simple but quite flexible vector-only mapping program that is no longer distributed -- well suited to the needs of the author who occasionally needs simple maps for books or articles. Input files (points or polylines) are very simple space-delimited .CSV files where each record has an ID code, ELong, and NLat, in decimal degrees. Converting .KML files to Versamap form is not difficult, but cumbersome and time-consuming if done by hand.

[Gorky]

Will,
take a look at http://nils.weidmann...rojects/cshapes !
There is also a complete tread about historical datasets at : http://gis.stackexch...les/17271#17271, which may be of interest for you too

Greetings Gorky

[woneil]

Thanks very much, Gorky.

take a look at http://nils.weidmann...rojects/cshapes !

A very useful set of data, but not for my current needs, which leave off just before he starts. What I need are borders before rather than after World War II.

There is also a complete tread about historical datasets at : http://gis.stackexch...les/17271#17271, which may be of interest for you too

Gives some sources of potential future interest.

I'm afraid I'm going to be doing a lot of tracing – not my favorite activity.

[Gorky]

...
What I need are borders before rather than after World War II.

...

I'm afraid I'm going to be doing a lot of tracing – not my favorite activity.

Will, there is an other interesting source here:
http://www.stanford....e/pub.php?id=51
under the flash-animation there is a download link for the shapefiles, there are two layers dealing with europe before WWII:
april 1938 and april1939
 Zwischenablage.jpg   88.37K   17 downloads
the license says nocommerical usage only
Greetings gorky