This project was something I started after writing the ShowEq map parser for my Mapfiend project. I wanted to see how far I could delve into digital data formats.

I grabbed some nice large world images from NASA, and some geographic vector data from NGDC in the form of .vct files and went to work picking the .vct files apart.

The .vct file format is very simple, so I wrote a basic .vct file parser and plotter in php. The plotter reads and parses the .vct files on the fly. No prior data translation has taken place, however the SCALE of each vector file has to be programmed in, since I wasn't able to find that in the .vct file (I didn't spend much time looking through them).

you can play with the plotter below ( it takes time to generate. Be patient. )

And download here: map_plot.zip