v4.0.0
See CHANGELOG for full details. Here's a quick summary:
- The v4 series introduces significant changes to admin-0 country shapes to account for the disputed area of Crimea, and several important admin-0 country name changes like Czechia renamed from Czech Republic. Admin-0 population and GDP values have also been updated to 2016/2017 vintage (primarily from CIA World Factbook).
- The v4 series introduces web map optimized
min_zoom
,min_label
, andmax_label
properties that compliment the existingscalerank
property that was originally curated for print cartography in proper projection glory. Themin_zoom
property is optimized for the web Mercator projection we are collectively hallucinating, and themin_label
andmax_label
properties are optional on some themes when the label should be displayed later than the feature's geometry (or should stop showing). Fixes: #200, #202. - While the v3 series went full UTF-8 unicode (character encoding) language support a few errors were made along the way. v4 fixes bad Windows-1252 to UTF-8 conversion bugs. We also better document with the character encoding by adding a .cpg file to shapefile, and on the Natural Earth website documentation. Fixes #89, #186, 4RUN1M5S75; thanks Jeremy and @pnorman.
- More names in more languages! We added French names for marine areas way back in v1.4.0, and v4 adds many thousand more for populated places in the following languages:
name_en
,name_de
,name_es
,name_fr
,name_pt
,name_ru
,name_zh
. The existingname
,name_alt
, andnameascii
fields have been updated, and name features over 600 labels with accent marks (versus the 80 or so that were garbled in the v3 series).