Creating country outlines with capital similar to this (details inside)

[mmark]

Hello,

I'm looking to create country outlines with some surrounding territories/water and I hope someone can point me in to the right direction. Basically I want to achieve something like this: https://www.freevectormaps.com

Their FAQ says it's done with data from natural earth and GIS software but nothing more.

Thank you in advance,
M.

[Azélor]

What software do you have ? You can use Gimp as it's a free one or Inkscape if you want to do vectors.

Generally, making the outline is easy because you just need to add a border to the existing shape, the shape of the country for example.

[Gamerprinter]

Your linked example is simply a vector shape given a solid color (green), its not even a border, it just has a different color than the background. Which begs the question, how many countries do you need to designate and if more than one, are they going to be in different colors? You could do this in an image editor as well (like GIMP or Photoshop), but it would be easier in vector (Inkscape, Illustrator).

I use a vector app called Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 9, while not free, its cheaper than a lot of commercial software and very powerful, though this operation you need is very simple to do. Draw the shape of your designated nation, and apply a color - that's it.

Since my land is detailed with photos or drawn textures of mountains, rivers, plains, forest, etc, so that all the land in a region/continent looks earth-like, when I place borders they are only outlines, sometimes dashed, sometimes other settings, usually also give transparency (so you can still see the detail behind the border) with the interior blank, so the land textures show through.

[mmark]

Your linked example is simply a vector shape given a solid color (green), its not even a border, it just has a different color than the background. Which begs the question, how many countries do you need to designate and if more than one, are they going to be in different colors? You could do this in an image editor as well (like GIMP or Photoshop), but it would be easier in vector (Inkscape, Illustrator).

I use a vector app called Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 9, while not free, its cheaper than a lot of commercial software and very powerful, though this operation you need is very simple to do. Draw the shape of your designated nation, and apply a color - that's it.

Since my land is detailed with photos or drawn textures of mountains, rivers, plains, forest, etc, so that all the land in a region/continent looks earth-like, when I place borders they are only outlines, sometimes dashed, sometimes other settings, usually also give transparency (so you can still see the detail behind the border) with the interior blank, so the land textures show through.

Thanks for the answer. I know that but this needs to be automated as I need all the countries in the world + their capital location (this is important as I have found the svg's for the countries only) and their surroundings - land and/or ocean/sea just like on that site. I can get shapefiles from natural earth data but have no idea how to iterate and create each automatically by changing the filters. I can do it by hand with something like QGIS but obviously that is not a solution to me.

[Hai-Etlik]

Well, you could probably rig something up to do that using GeoTools if you know Java. For each country you're going to want to figure out an appropriate projection, probably the easiest to automate would be an azimuthal projection (Stereographic, LAEA, Orthographic, ec) about the country's centroid. Wikipedia does this with Orthographic projections. Any other GIS library or scriptable GIS should work for this.