Tips for placing custom city dots accurately

Submitted by Marjamjelly on September 15, 2025

A very large Australia cities quiz is in the works (~1800 cities) and I was wondering if you guys have any tips for placing dots in the right place on svgs very far inland, because there are no references to help placement.

13 Comments

Level 73

Sep 15, 2025

Try to match its latitude and longitude with certain inlets and provincial borders, always does the trick for me.

Level 79

Sep 15, 2025

I usually just make all my maps mercator projection and overlay screenshots of google maps in inkscape

Level 57

Sep 16, 2025

When making a quiz with a lot of cities, do you have an easy way to make the smaller cities visible in the screenshot?

Level 79

Sep 17, 2025

Just splice multiple higher zoom level ones together. As long as you don’t have maps on globe view and don’t zoom in or out between screenshots you should be able to fit them together perfectly within inkscape

Level 57

Sep 17, 2025

Thanks! Also, man I bet a pc would be better for this. I’m using an iPad with a web svg editor (works basically the same as inkspcape and this method works)

Level 79

Sep 17, 2025

Oh yeah that's brutal. Good luck, looking forward to the quiz!

Level 40

Sep 15, 2025

I personally just use the JetPunk Dot Placer tool, googling the co-ordinates and copypasting them in.

Unless I'm misunderstanding the question

Level 57

Sep 15, 2025

I’m using a custom SVG which makes the dot placer not work

Unless I’m bad at the dot placer

Level 40

Sep 16, 2025

Oh, of course. I should have realised.

Jeremy's idea is a very good one for your case

Level 57

Sep 16, 2025

Well, you could still use the dot placer tool on the world map and then superimpose it with you custom map to keep the exact coordinates of you dots.

Level 71

Sep 15, 2025

I never knew Australia had so many cities...

Level 57

Sep 15, 2025

Funnily enough, this is actually a lot less cities than I could have done. I chose to use the cities/towns listed on citypopulation.de, however if I had used something like cityquiz.io for instance, I would have ended up with closer to 3000 cities.

Level 57

Sep 16, 2025

But the CityQuiz database is pretty... weird, let's say, and focus on population settlements rather than cities. So I think you made the right choice.

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