Question

I have a written up HTML file using the Google Maps API v3.

All I want to do is color a couple of countries, for example, color in China and Canada to red. What is a simple solution (that doesn’t involve Polygons and thousands of coordinates) to color in countries?

After browsing previous StackOverFlow questions, there seemed to be three common solutions. However these 3 solutions do not seem appropriate for my situation.

1. Charts API
   -I don’t really understand if Charts API is a good solution for me because I have already have a file using Google Maps API. Unless Charts can be applied over my map, or synchronize with the map, this does not seem to be a valid solution.

2. Styling (With Styling Wizard)
   -This wizard (as far as I know) deals with the style of general characteristics, like road, water, population, etc. Unless someone can show me how to assign a specific country a color, I do not see how this can work.

3. Polygons
   -I saw the example of the Bermuta triangle and other people have suggested to get the coordinates of the perimeter of a country and create a polygon. This may work except I may need a thousands of coordinates in order to fully outline China. Perhaps there is a more simple method in which I can color in a country?

Answer 1

Use either FusionTablesLayer or KmlLayer.
Both take kml formated geographical data and render it on tiles, yielding better performance with complex or large numbers of polygons.

The Natural Earth data set is available in Fusion Tables, and contains most countries.