----------------------------Original message---------------------------- State University of New York at Stony Brook Stony Brook, NY 11794-3331 David Y Allen Library-Reference 516 632-7110 23-Jul-1996 10:05am EDT FROM: DYALLEN TO: Remote Addressee ( [log in to unmask] ) Subject: Maps in CIA World Factbook CD John Stevenson's questions about the resolution of the maps in the new CD-ROM version of the CIA World Factbook prompted me to take a quick look at the image files using HiJaak Pro. It turns out that the maps are all low-resolution TIFF images, which are stored in their own sub-directory. There are two types of images--black and white, and color. The black and white images are of very simple maps and can be read without difficulty. The color reference maps are indeed created at too low a resolution to be of much use--whole letters in the legend and smaller place names are represented by two or three pixels. The problem is not with your computer. There is no way this situation can be imroved upon except by reissuing the CD with images scanned at a higher resolution. Probably the images were scanned at such a low resolution for one of two reasons. Either there was not enough room on the CD-ROM for the large files that high resolution images would require. Or the makers of the CD did not want to require users to scroll through the maps. I would opt for maps that could be either be scrolled or zoomed in on to get more detail. It seems pointless to me to put maps on a CD that are of such low resolution that they are nearly useless. I believe that higher resolution images of many of these maps can be found among the CIA maps scanned in at the University of Texas at Austin. (http:www.lib.utexas.edu/Libs/PCL/Map_collection/Map_collection.html). The address of this URL is case sensitive.