So yeah, all this searching and I never found anything better for map projection than good old NASA's G.Projector. Which was nice and all, but not the most useful tool re: resolution of the images it processed.

And then cctoide showed me Flex Projector [link] . My god. This program is perfect for my needs. I've already used it once, for the Steamopera Earth map (for which I already had equirectangular bases and whatnot read), and am going to continue using it for new maps of Venus and Mars, so keep your eyes on this space for l'updates.

Caveat: When you wish to convert your raster image of a map into another projection, it isn't viewed in the program itself, but it does a conversion into a .tiff as an import-export process. The base-map (if it's not special in some way I haven't tried to figure out yet, probably some sort of metadata tags etc) needs to be 2x1 in size to be projected at all (otherwise the program will fail the projection), and in the equirectangular projection (also known as plate carree, equidistant cylindrical, geographical and etc. projection) to be projected correctly.

The MOLA Mars maps and Venus topographical maps are equirectangular: Finding large equirectangular maps of Earth that shows nations and rivers and such is hard to on the internet, but some programs, like MICRODEM [link] will be able to generate a map in the right size and projection for you.

For MICRODEM, you first Open Vector Map > Choose (click twice) Equidistant Cylindrical as the map projection > OK, and then Manage Overlays in the map window (which will be blank) and choose to view the World Outlines overlay (which has the largest rivers, Cold War era nations and land outlines). There's also other geographical information available on the internet from some US agencies and whatnot which I've used, like the rivers of North America and some adjacent areas, which was indispensable for the redrawing of the North American borders in the Steamopera world map.


In other news, I started on a short story some weeks ago. This also was because of a tool I'd found on the internet.

For a while now, I've been interested in text-writing tools other than plain text and WYSIWYG editors. Surely there must be things like code-writing software or whatnot, except aimed at fiction writers, and yeah, turns out there's a small industry centered around over-priced "novel-writing tools". Well, I am a well-known lazy cheap-skate who doesn't even bother pirating stuff like that anymore, because sooner or later someone's going to drop a freeware or open source version in front of me: and lo and behold, we have yWriter 4 [link] , from Spacejock Software.

This had been what I'd looked for, and it's pretty good at what it does. Basically, the text of your story is presented as chunks, instead of a constant stream: scenes instead of a whole book. It also has stuff like character-name highlighting, some small location/item database functionalities (not as much as with characters, though), meta-info stuff and some rudimentary spell-checking capabilities. The meat and bones, though, is the visualisation and... work-space presented by the scene-chunk-chapter method. I've found it somewhat enlightening to use it, because it lets you concentrate on one thing at a time, but not necessarily in that order. Scenes and chapters can be shuffled around with ease, and, though I've not done that much, writing scenes from random places as your fancy takes should be easy this way.

There's also some word-count tools, daily word-count goal meters, etc. The Scene menu also has a small > Writing Help tool, but all that does is flash you with an ok-dialog presenting the same advice as last time: which is fine by me.


I've also been using the new version of Inkscape yesterday, and it feels slightly different. Ctrl-A and the Node tools are woefully slow, though, which is strange. Otherwise, rendering is much faster. The tools and tool dialogues have a new system, and the whole thing has become more of all-in-one-window thing and un-GIMPier. The GUI has become a bit vulnerable to graphical glitches and artifaction of the tool-bar - it's gone "white until you roll your mouse over it" on me twice already, when switching between programs.


I've also been using my new tablet I bought some months ago. It's a cheap A3-size Aiptek Hyperpen (a hundred bucks), and perfect for my clumsy monkey hands. Who needs a 3000e wacom tablet anyhow? Not me!