File talk:Map of Minnesota NA.jpg

This is the discussion/talk page for Image:Map of Minnesota NA.jpg.

Created

This map was created 12-Aug-2007 to begin showing roadmaps in WP articles about Minnesota. Previously, most city/town articles had blank county maps with no towns/roads shown. The map was extracted from a US National Atlas page, then cropped/retouched to clarify many names and reduce edges to display much faster. -Wikid77 03:50, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

Bolding town names

13-Aug-2007: A major issue is bolding/darkening of town names to be readable when the map is resized smaller (to appear within an article). Many names have been darkened to use 3-pixel-wide lettering (the map began as a huge 1600-pixel width, so 3-pixel lines are needed for better visibility when the map is rescaled smaller). Even so, visibility of small lettering is still strained, so I plan to split the map into east/west regional maps to allow each map to appear with 25% larger magnification in an article. -Wikid77 03:50, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

Planning map readability

14-Aug-2007: Okay, so readability of map labels must be engineered: just resizing a map does not guarantee that smaller labels will be readable within an article (despite well-wishing for auto-resized images). In reality, the graphical resizing (based on an original 800-pixel width) seems to need lettering wider than 2.5-pixel width to be visible. A 2.5-pixel line can be 2 solid-lines + a gray-line, or a 3-pixel line of darker coloring. Labels that use only 2-pixel lettering typically would appear as blurry/fuzzy wording when an 800-pixel map is displayed as 300-pixel width (in an article). Larger maps require even wider/darker lettering: so, the 1600-pixel (2 x 800) Minnesota map needed 5-pixel (2 x 2.5) lines to be readable when shown resized to 300-pixel width. Labels with only 4-pixel lettering (on 1600px maps) appeared blurry/fuzzy when resized as 300px width. Darkening labels to 5-pixel width is tedious. Alternate solution: split map to more narrow widths; Minnesota maps can be split into east/west focus regional maps, with each map about 1200px wide, allowing 3-pixel lettering to appear more readable (for 300px resizing). -Wikid77 03:57, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

Distance scale

15-Aug-2007: I have finally added the legend distance-scale (as 50 miles or 80 kilometers) inside the Wisconsin shaded area. The original, massive Atlas image used a 100-mile scale (no km), but the revised (quick) map is more narrow, so a 50-mile scale has been inserted instead of 100-mile. Recall that by being more narrow, the revised map appears magnified 400% (to make most town names readable) clearer than the massive, cumbersome Atlas PNG file, which appeared as mostly a blur when shown in articles. -Wikid77 15:14, 15 August 2007 (UTC)