Missing lakes make some maps look awkward

[yaph]

Especially the US map without the great lakes. So find a way to incorporate lakes at least in country level maps, even better in all maps, i. e. the topojson sources.

[yaph]

Look into merging the lakes and admin/countries shapefiles with gdal http://www.gdal.org/drv_shapefile.html

A merge of two shapefiles 'file1.shp' and 'file2.shp' into a new file 'file_merged.shp' is performed like this:

% ogr2ogr file_merged.shp file1.shp
% ogr2ogr -update -append file_merged.shp file2.shp -nln file_merged

The second command is opening file_merged.shp in update mode, and trying to find existing layers and append the features being copied.
The -nln option sets the name of the layer to be copied to.