world map without rivers with matplotlib / Basemap?

Question

Would there be a way to plot the borders of the continents with Basemap (or without Basemap, if there is some other way), without those annoying rivers coming along? Especially

Answer 1

If you're OK with plotting outlines rather than shapefiles, it's pretty easy to plot coastlines that you can get from wherever. I got my coastlines from the NOAA Coastline Extractor in MATLAB format: http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/shorelines/shorelines.html

To edit the coastlines, I converted to SVG, then edited them with Inkscape, then converted back to the lat/lon text file ("MATLAB" format).

All Python code is included below.

# ---------------------------------------------------------------
def plot_lines(mymap, lons, lats, **kwargs) :
    """Plots a custom coastline.  This plots simple lines, not
    ArcInfo-style SHAPE files.

    Args:
        lons: Longitude coordinates for line segments (degrees E)
        lats: Latitude coordinates for line segments (degrees N)

    Type Info:
        len(lons) == len(lats)
        A NaN in lons and lats signifies a new line segment.

    See:
        giss.noaa.drawcoastline_file()
    """

    # Project onto the map
    x, y = mymap(lons, lats)

    # BUG workaround: Basemap projects our NaN's to 1e30.
    x[x==1e30] = np.nan
    y[y==1e30] = np.nan

    # Plot projected line segments.
    mymap.plot(x, y, **kwargs)


# Read "Matlab" format files from NOAA Coastline Extractor.
# See: http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/coast/

lineRE=re.compile('(.*?)\s+(.*)')
def read_coastline(fname, take_every=1) :
    nlines = 0
    xdata = array.array('d')
    ydata = array.array('d')
    for line in file(fname) :
#        if (nlines % 10000 == 0) :
#            print 'nlines = %d' % (nlines,)
        if (nlines % take_every == 0 or line[0:3] == 'nan') :
            match = lineRE.match(line)
            lon = float(match.group(1))
            lat = float(match.group(2))

            xdata.append(lon)
            ydata.append(lat)
        nlines = nlines + 1


    return (np.array(xdata),np.array(ydata))

def drawcoastline_file(mymap, fname, **kwargs) :
    """Reads and plots a coastline file.
    See:
        giss.basemap.drawcoastline()
        giss.basemap.read_coastline()
    """

    lons, lats = read_coastline(fname, take_every=1)
    return drawcoastline(mymap, lons, lats, **kwargs)
# =========================================================
# coastline2svg.py
#
import giss.io.noaa
import os
import numpy as np
import sys

svg_header = """