Hi,
I'm totally new to working with this kind of data, so my question might be a no-brainer for you... Anyways, I plotted some maps in R (eg. plot(fin2) with raw .shp-finland data) and found the y and x scales to not match, ie the countries are too "fat". It worked nicely with data from other sources, though. Am I making a mistake, or how do I process the coordinates in a way that will get the scales right?
Would be great if you could help me out, so that I might use the awesome gadm-infrastructure properly...
Cheers
Steffen
R scales
Normally, sp (the R package used) plots lon/lat data by adjusting the relative with and height of the plot based on latitude. That leads in most cases to a reasonable map. This is also how the preview maps have been created. I do not know why this does not work in your case. One option might be to use spTransform (rgdal package) and transform the data to another Coordinate Reference System (CRS, projection), appropriate for Finland.