FAQ

Q: It takes a long time to make a plot with the 'intermediate' or 'high'
resolution coastlines, how can I speed it up?

A: There is a overhead in processing boundary datasets when a Basemap
class in created, and this overhead can be significant for the higher
resolution boundaries.  If you are makeing many maps for the same region,
you only need to create you Basemap class instance once, then re-use it
for each plot.  If the plots are being created by different scripts, you
can save the Basemap class instance to a Pickle on disk, then read it in
whatever script needs it (it's much faster to read a pickle from disk than
it is to create the Basemap instance originally). The hires.py example
illustrates how to do this.

Q: I have my own boundary dataset that I would like to use, how do I use
it in place of (or in addition to) the built-in basemap boundary datasets?

A: If your dataset is in ESRI shapefile format, this is relatively easy.
Just create your Basemap class instance, then call the 'readshapefile'
method on that instance to import your data.  Setting 'drawbounds=True'
will draw the boundaries in the shapefile.  The fillstates.py example
shows how to do this.

Q: How do I specify the map projection region if I don't know what the
latitude and longitudes of the corners are?

A: As an alternative to specifying the lat/lon values for the upper-right
and lower-left corners of the projection domain (using the llcrnrlat,
llcrnrlon, urcrnrlat and urcrnrlon keywords) you can specify the center of
the map projection domain (using the lat_0 and lon_0 keywords) and the
width and height of the domain in map projection coordinates (meters)
using the width and height keywords.  Basemap will then calculate the
corresponging values of llcrnrlat, llcrnrlon, urcrnrlat and urcrnrlon.
Examples of this are given in the garp.py and setwh.py examples.