User talk:Ascended Dreamer

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-- Wikimedia Commons Welcome (talk) 19:52, 4 September 2021 (UTC)

File:Kingdom of Hungary counties.svg and File:Ethnic Map of Hungary 1910 with Counties.png

Hi. I have reverted your edits to File:Kingdom of Hungary counties.svg:

• The file you uploaded is not a true SVG, merely a raster image contained within an SVG file. This should be avoided. (See {{FakeSVG}}.)
• Some of the borders are not accurate:
  • The border between Bars/Hont erroneously gives the Léva (Levice) district to Hont when it should belong to Bars.
  • The border between Csongrád/Bács-Bodrog seems to follow the modern Serbian-Hungarian border in the east, but it shouldn't: the settlements of Backi vinogradi and Horgos should belong to Csongrád.
  • There are a few distorted/misplaced borders, the most prominent of which are the southern border of Szerém/Syrmia County, which is too far north (relative to the other borders; maybe the others are too far south), the border of Komárom county with Poszony and Nytra counties, and the borders between Komárom, Győr, Fejér and Veszprém.

These border inaccuracies also seem to apply to your other file File:Ethnic Map of Hungary 1910 with Counties.png. I have applied a rough fix to the Bars/Hont and Csongrád/Bács-Bodrog borders on this file but there's only so much I can do with only the .png to work with.

Alphathon /ˈæɫfə.θしーたɒn/ ^(talk) 08:43, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

Thank you, I am especially amazed by the big error I made with the border of Bars and Hont Counties. I went ahead and incorporated your corrections into the Ethnic Map file, I have updated it. I was not able to find errors involving Szerém County or the area around Komárom County with one small exception. I have also made these fixes to the County Map, which I upload here.

I know little to nothing of Inkscape and SVG image format, apologies for mistakenly creating a fake SVG. My impression is that SVG is useful due to scalability, but the County Map which I had overwritten with my fake SVG is so lacking in detail/accuracy, I wonder why it is in SVG anyway. Would it be worthwhile attempting to make this image into a true SVG?

Also, I am impressed by your noticing of the errors; what is your resource that helped you to spot them?

Ascended Dreamer (talk) 21:38, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

My original intention was to simply fix the Bars/Hont and Csongrád/Bács-Bodrog borders (which I noticed just by looking at the image, having worked quite a lot with maps of the Austrian Empire/Austria-Hungary before), and found the other errors while trying to "line up" my source maps. (I also noticed that the easternmost part of Syrmia, just across from Belgrade, was a bit too "pointy", but didn't realise why until I checked it.) It was only when I went to do the fixing after that that I noticed it wasn't a true SVG.

Would I be right in saying you're working with individual county maps or similar, rather than a single map of the whole kingdom? If so I suspect the errors were introduced when joining them together/compositing them. Most of the errors with border positioning are only really noticeable when you take the map and compare it with a map of the whole kingdom – when taken individually they (mostly) look about right but when you look at the "corners" where they join they don't quite line up properly.

This sort of thing is quite difficult to explain in words, but if, for example, you look at the point where Vas and Sopron meet Lower Austria, you can see that on your map Sopron extends to the north-north-west relative to Vas, whereas the Lower Austrian border there should be an essentially continuous arc (compare your border with the one on this sheet of the 1884 A Magyar Állam közigazgatási térképe), with the Vas-Sopron border simply running up to it; there should be no "step" there. To put it another way, if we assume that Vas and Moson are both accurate relative to Lower Austria, the Sopron-Lower Austria Border is about 10px too far north and about 6px too far west (although it isn't quite as linear as that).

For the Komárom region, if you take the borders of Győr with Sopron, Moson and Pozsony as accurate, and the borders of Komárom with Esztergom and Bars as accurate, then the rest of Komárom's borders (with Nytra, Pozsony, Győr, Veszprém and Fejér) are about 6px too far south and 6px too far east; the border between Győr and Veszprém then needs to be rotated/twisted so it meets Komárom in the right place. The Fejér/Veszprem border also needs to move north-west at the top, but at the bottom needs to move about 6px south (as does the Fejér/Tolna border and the Sió between the tripoint and the Danube).

For Syrmia (Szerém) etc, if you take the eastern border of Syrmia with Torontál and the northern borders of Bács-Bodrog and Baranya as correct, the eastern part of the border with Bács-Bodrog is also roughly correct, but the western half is shifted north from around Ilok, as are the borders of Bács-Bodrog/Baranya/Verőcze/Pozsega, both internal and external (as are the rivers). In the south of Syrmia/Pozsega the border (with Serbia and Bosnia) is at its eastern end about 22px too far north and 10px too far west, but is roughly right by around the southernmost point of Pozsega.

These descriptions are relative though – without a projection to compare things to in absolute terms its difficult to say what is "correct" and what is wrong. (Is it Komárom's borders with Nytra, Pozsony, Győr, Veszprém and Fejér that are wrong, or is it Győr's with Sopron, Moson and Pozsony and Komárom's with Esztergom and Bars? Are they both wrong in different ways?)

I could go on but I don't really think it's possible to be exhaustive, and without seeing your original source file it is difficult to give specific advice. (I'm also not familiar with GIMP so couldn't really be that specific even if I did have it in front of me.)

Sources-wise I mostly use manually vectorised data from various survey maps (e.g. the Austro-Hungarian 3rd Military Mapping Survey), which I then reproject, scale down and simplify. It is not something I would recommend unless you need very detailed maps though as it is very time consuming to actually do.

There is no need to apologise for the pseudo-SVG – mistakes happen. The advantages of SVGs aren't just scalability but also ease of translation, editing, reuse and often file size (although most of those don't apply much to this file in particular, especially as you haven't used any kind of anti-aliasing on your borders and text). If you're interested I would definitely suggest giving Inkscape a go as the barrier to entry is pretty low and once you get used to how it works the skills are mostly the same as for raster graphics.

As for a more detailed SVG, I am working on one at the moment – I only have Transylvania and a few of the other counties left to do.

Alphathon /ˈæɫfə.θしーたɒn/ ^(talk) 17:45, 21 July 2023 (UTC)