[FEATURE] Built-in Natural Earth profile

[msbarry]

It would be cool to include a profile showcasing all of the vector layers available in Natural Earth

Some issues I ran into prototyping this:

• Need to use Natural Earth shapefile instead of sqlite (and deprecate sqlite one since it's redundant) since some data only exists in the shapefile distribution (i.e. bathymetry)
• Shapefile reader only supports a single .shp file inside a zip, but natural earth is distributed as many .shp files in a single zip file. There's some debug data in there too so need a way to filter to only some .shp files.
• Shapefile reader needs to support configurable charsets (Natural Earth uses UTF-8)
• Some named polygons (i.e. Physical Labels) are useless in MapLibre, they need to be converted to centerlines ([FEATURE] Polygon centerlines #13) or centroid labels to be useful
• Visvalingham-Wyatt simplification would produce better results simplifying geometries at lower zoom levels

[rene-mueller]

@wipfli can you possibly help with bathymetry for example?

[rene-mueller]

@msbarry possibly the following articles can help as well:

• https://documentation.maptiler.com/hc/en-us/articles/9818655484433-How-to-build-an-ocean-vector-bathymetry-map-with-MapTiler
• https://medium.com/nightingale/styling-ocean-depth-data-in-mapbox-studio-c03f71ba6a2a

[msbarry]

Good point. If all you want is bathymetry this is pretty straightforward.