[R-pkgs] announcing maps version 3.1.0

[Alex Deckmyn]

Hi, 

I am pleased to announce version 3.1.0 of the 'maps' package which has a few important changes and additions. 

CHANGES: 
- The 'world' map has been adapted: it now doesn't contain any lakes anymore. Most visible effect is the Great Lakes on the Canada/USA border. 
- Major lakes are now available in a separate database 'lakes', so they can still be added to a plot if desired. 
- As a result, plotting without interior borders now gives much cleaner results. 
- The 'world2' database has been cleaned up a bit to look better at the boundaries. 

ADDITIONS: 
- map() now accepts spatial objects of types SpatialPolygon[DataFrame] and SpatialLines[DataFrame] as database. The support is limited to the actual polygon co-ordinates and names. Any other information (plotting order, projection etc) is lost. So one can now for instance read shapefile data (e.g. readShapePoly() from the maptools package) and pass the result to map(). 

FIXES: 
- map(...,fill=TRUE) will no longer apply thinning to the map. The thinning caused polygons to have non-matching borders. For large databases (e.g. the complete worldHires database) this may have a noticable effect on speed. 

Alex Deckmyn 


--- 
Dr. Alex Deckmyn e-mail: alex.deckmyn at meteo.be 
Royal Meteorological Institute http://www.meteo.be 
Ringlaan 3, 1180 Ukkel, Belgium tel. (32)(2)3730646 


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