Question

I need to build an interactive map of South Africa so that when someone clicks on the provinces the right Google Map displays. I eventually opted to convert a vector based map of South African provinces I have to fonts/glyphs. This worked super well and you can view them here.

http://vane.co.za/files/south-african-province-glyphs/demo.html

EDIT: I've added a jsFiddle here for the map

The map is one whole map of South Africa with its different provinces so what I did was take each province from within illustrator and copy them into a new document. I then clipped the white board to fit exactly around the edges ensuring that every SVG file I saved was exact.

I saved every file as an SVG and imported it to IcoMoon which then converted it to a font for me. So far so good.

I would assume that that when I import these fonts without a font size, they should all render in their original size so that I can piece together the different province maps into one whole South african map but this is not the case.

I thought that giving them an equal EM sizes will scale them proportionally so that each one is it's own correct size but this has not worked either.

Is there a way to match these maps up so that they all fit perfectly back to the country map again?

I hope this makes sense?

EDIT:

I've gone back to http://icomoon.io where I generated the glyphs and figured out that they are being created at 16px X 16px. However, even if I scale them by px according to the size I want them, they still do not slot into one another correctly.

In Firebug I am nulling all the font sizes and using the layout inspector. These are all the width sizes I managed to get; the heights are all 16px.

North-West     - 22px 
Limpopo        - 24
Mpumalanga     - 15px
KwaZulu-Natal  - 13px
Gauteng        - 15px
Free-State     - 19px
Eastern-Cape   - 24px
Western-Cape   - 20px
Northern-Cape  - 15px

The example below is my attempt at scaling the glyphs up manually but the smaller provinces can be seen in the top left.

EDIT: These are the actual sizes they need to be in order for them to puzzle together nicely inside that white block:

North-West     - 75.684px
Limpopo        - 73.217px
Mpumalanga     - 50.286px
KwaZulu-Natal  - 53.248px
Gauteng        - 25.817px
Free-State     - 72.984px
Eastern-Cape   - 99.397px
Western-Cape   - 84.725px
Northern-Cape  - 120.514px

enter image description here

Was it helpful?

Solution

You clipped the art boards of each shape to match the shape itself. This means you lose all relative sizing between the shapes once you turn them into a font glyph. A tiny little province will be as tall as the largest one if you render your glyphs in the same font-size.

The easiest solution is to not clip artboard the shapes. That way you preserve the scale of each glyph:

enter image description here

Smaller provinces will have a lot of empty space inside the glyph, but they'll all overlap nicely.

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