Maps and Python

Today I 'ave mainly been thinking about drawing maps with Python.

There is an amazing free resource here which provides coastline data for the whole world in several different resolutions.

The coastline data can be downloaded here in binary format (gshhs_2.0.zip) and there is a C program to convert the binary data to ASCII (gshhs_1.12_src.zip).

Just for fun I have produced a Pythonic version of gshhs.c gshhs.py.