http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_polygon_map
Political maps use 2-level coloring schemes. Main color is selected as to avoid 2 neighbour countries having the same color. It's shade is selected randomly.
The problem is to select such N (N about 8) colors generators, and such colors for seas, rivers, city and country labels, and other objects (borders, river/mountains/island/sea labels etc.), that makes maps most readable.
Currently used scheme is:
Colors for: city dots white city labels white rivers #000060 seas #000060 country labels #FF8080 Color generator 0 # cyan $r = rand 64; $g = 160 + rand 64; $b = 160 + rand 64; Color generator 1 # green $r = 64 + rand 64; $g = 160 + rand 64; $b = 64 + rand 64; Color generator 2 # yellow-green $r = 128 + rand 32; $g = 192 + rand 64; $b = rand 32; Color generator 3 # greenish-blue $r = rand 32; $g = 64 + rand 64; $b = 128 + rand 64; Color generator 4 # yellow $r = 128 + rand 64; $g = 96 + rand 64; $b = rand 32; Color generator 5 # orange $r = 128 + rand 64; $g = 64 + rand 64; $b = rand 64; Color generator 6 # magenta $r = 160 + rand 64; $g = 64 + rand 64; $b = 160 + rand 64; Color generator 7 # gray $r = 96 + rand 64; $g = $r - 16 + rand 32; $b = $r - 16 + rand 32;
But it doesn't give very good results.
Anyone with better idea for coloring ?
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_polygon_map
Political maps use 2-level coloring schemes.
In what context? AFAIK, generally people use 4 colours, typically pastel colours for political maps.
Main color is selected as to avoid 2 neighbour countries having the same color. It's shade is selected randomly.
Again, in what context? Is your mail a proposal or does it describe the current state? In any case, random colours doesn't sound right.
The problem is to select such N (N about 8) colors generators, and such colors for seas, rivers, city and country labels, and other objects (borders, river/mountains/island/sea labels etc.), that makes maps most readable. [snip] Anyone with better idea for coloring?
How about a predefined colour scheme where the software could select random colours among the predefined set? I'm not sure if "randomly" means "random RGB values" or "a random colour among a predefined set", so we may be talking about the same thing. In any case, even if we are, the predefined colour set should be reconsidered IMO based on what the maps in that link look like.
Gutza
On Sat, Sep 06, 2003 at 02:29:23AM +0300, Gutza wrote:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_polygon_map
Political maps use 2-level coloring schemes.
In what context? AFAIK, generally people use 4 colours, typically pastel colours for political maps.
From what I can see it my atlas they use many many more.
Main color is selected as to avoid 2 neighbour countries having the same color. It's shade is selected randomly.
Again, in what context? Is your mail a proposal or does it describe the current state? In any case, random colours doesn't sound right.
It's the current state - 2-level coloring is used. Look at the globe on http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_polygon_map
It's just that better colors are needed. What's needed is N sets of colors such that: * if color c1 belong to set s1, and color c2 belong to set s2, then they contrast very well and we can color neighbour countries with them * if colors c1 and c2 belong to the same set, there's still pretty big probablity that they look distinguishable.
Because of requirement 1 we can't make too many color sets. Because of 2 they should have more than just 1 color.
Anyway 2-level coloring looks much better than either: * totally random coloring * non-conflicting coloring with 5 colors
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