Looking for a map generator (political maps)
 

Hi, I'd like to put my maps I do in the geography course onto my computer, but I have no idea of what software I should use.
I need :

• A blank map of the world builtin or quickly accessible
• To be able to fill a country with a specific color, have a legend, etc.
• Draw arrows (curved or not if possible), plot cities, etc.
• If possible, a City database, so it's easier to add something
• To plot bezier-like curves, if a certain part of a country should be of a different colour.

I tried QGIS http://qgis.org/ but it seems quite difficult to use.
I also found : http://karto.free.fr/liens.html but I don't know which one I should use.

P.S. : Please, only GTK :) I'll use QT programs if I really need to, but I prefer to keep my xfce environment as light as possible :)

Could somebody help me :) ?
Please ?

You could look around at the grass wiki http://grass.gdf-hannover.de/wiki/Main_Page
and also at that site http://www.osgeo.org/
Maybe something there fits what you need.

I too played with GIS tools, and found myself getting lost in a lot of file formats I didn't understand. I tried QGIS too, and for GUI apps it seemed like the best bet (I was going to recommend it when I read the thread title). I get the feeling that the grass and other "back end" GIS software is amazingly powerful, but totally beyond what would even need, or fully understand.

If all you want to do is plot shapes by hand, you might do better by using Inkscape or a similar vector graphic application. Inkscape uses the SVG format, which is an XML-based thing which should be fairly easy to generate programatically, if you're into coding a generator yourself.

Another option is gnuplot, although I think it's a long shot. I vaguely recall a map plotting gnuplot example.

Pure QT apps aren't really much of an extra load. It's when they start to pull in all the KDE libraries that you get a real hit.