Enhanced gores projection

The main feature of this release is the option to change the number of gores present in the gores projection. It's a little bit janky to use a floating-point slider for an integer like this, but I was trying to minimize the amount of new code I had to write. It rounds the number you put in to the nearest integer before using it.

As a secondary gores-related enhancement, it now also supports the "Expand map area" option in the raster app.

fix issue with unicode in map projection names

There was a bug where map projections with unicode in their names (mostly en-dashes like in the Cahill–Keyes projection), would produce incorrectly encoded and invalid SVGs. this problem only happened sometimes for me, so I don't actually know exactly how much of an issue it was, but now it escapes those characters so it definitely shouldn't be an issue anymore.

I also improved the political maps so that you can select the whole EU with the "EU" class, and enhanced the top-level administrative divisions political template SVG to include the subcountries of the UK, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia. and added a new template SVG with rivers instead of political borders.

fix localization issue

Apparently I was localizing all my floating-point numbers before writing them to SVG, meaning that depending on your computer's settings it would sometimes write numbers like «0,0». This does not work, since SVG assumes «0.0»-style numbers. it's fixed now, tho.

Clipping paths and more

I made a few more minor changes. The main one is that, in the last release trying to load "Advanced/Supermap.svg" would cause an error, but now it works correctly. I also added clip paths to all of the SVG inputs (which takes advantage of the new map backgrounds to automaticly hide a lot of the erroneous lines that go outside the map area when it's concave), added an option in graticule.txt to revert to the old (3.4.x) graticule style, added India's states to "Advanced/Template provinces.svg", and relabelled the "Crop at dateline" checkbox to the more accurate "Extend map area" (its meaning is now reversed, of course).

AuthaGraph hotfix

I broke the "Power" slider in the IMAGO/AuthaGraph projection in that last commit. It was kind of partially intentional, but in retrospect it was a bad idea. Anyway, it's fixed now, so slide the power to yer hearts' content.

There are two other notable changes since 3.5.1:

• I rebranded one of my projections in the "Created by Justin" category to an IMAGO variant in the "Tetrahedral" category
• I shrank the Advanced/Template provinces.svg filesize by coarsening the borders and removing the top-level administrative division borders from all but a few large countries (who was ever going to color-code individual Armenian provinces?)

The Background Update

The main feature of this release is a new feature that I describe as map backgrounds. If an SVG map has a <rect> element that covers the whole domain, then when the map is converted to a different projection in MapDesignerVector, that element will be converted to a <path> that outlines the map region. I've modified all of the input SVGs to take advantage of this. For a rectangular map projections like Mercator or AuthaGraph you won't notice any difference, but for most projections the outputs from MapDesignerVector will now look much better.

Naturally there have also been several other changes over the past year.

• I added the Elastic projections, the next-generation of the Danseiji projection concept (blog post shortly forthcoming).
• I created more versions of the octahedral projections, including a single conformal octant, a Cahill–Keyes butterfly, and a Waterman with Antarctica reassembled at the bottom.
• I broke the Hammer retroazimuthal projection into three versions: the front hemisphere, the back hemisphere, and the combined form.
• I fixed an error in the Hammer retroazimuthal projection that was causing the back hemisphere to be flipped horizontally in the inverse projection.
• I added some new political SVG templates that are easier to customize for showing actual data.
• I ensured that SVGs generated by MapDesignerVector retain their XML declaration and that their elements preserve the order of their attributes.
• I made the meridians in the graticules of the raster maps thin out near the poles (update: as of v3.5.3 this can be disabled to reproduce the old behavior by editing the sparse_pole option in input/graticule.txt)
• I fixed several spelling errors.

For big maps

I added some features to deal with big maps a little better. You can load a single octant of an input map at a time now, and you can use it to project a single octant of a Cahill–Keyes projection. You'll haff to manually stitch them together yourself, though.

Advanced functionality

I added a file to the input folder called graticule.txt with some numbers in it. By modifying those numbers, you can now modify the thickness, color, and opacity of the graticule. Elegant? No, not at all. Usable? Heck yeah. Ideally, I would have a menu inside the program that lets you input new values into textboxen. But working with this text file is also not as bad as I expected. I have it read the file every time it makes a map, so you don't have to worry about refreshing or restarting the program when you change something, and the number of parameters is small enough that finding the right number to modify is not difficult. All in all, I think this is an alright (albeit janky) way to implement this functionality.

Bigger images

I made the max image size 30 000 × 30 000.

* Added Danseiji projections

I'm sorry. The Danseiji projections were completely broken in that last one. I promise this one will not have any critical unworkable bugs. I promise.