Quintillus' editor does & would be a good way to get a basic version of this to work from. Hence the desire for a map of physical rather than political geography. The next question would be what permutation of landmass arrangement to use.
Indeed, when I first saw this thread I thought of running it through the BIQ map converter, but the political map nature of it complicates that. I suppose it probably would still work for getting it to a land/water stage (since the ocean is all one color), but the terrain types on land would all be uniform.
Still, I might have to do that to have at least a starting point, that could then be enhanced by manual editing, or re-run when a physical map appears.
Hm, is it really more accurate re country sizes when Australia looks larger than US mainland and Brazil looks vastly larger than China or even Canada?
So I looked up Australia vs. the U.S. in area (they look roughly equal on the map to me), it's closer than I realized. The U.S. minus Alaska and Hawaii is roughly 3.13 million square miles; Australia is roughly 2.97 million square miles, for about a 5% difference in area. Would be slightly narrower if you don't count various overseas U.S. areas such as Guam and Puerto Rico. I was expecting a larger differences as well, but Alaska alone is more than a sixth of the total U.S. area and makes a big difference, and the U.S. would be definitively smaller than both China and Brazil if Alaska weren't included.
And doing some approximate comparisons on my local globe, it passes a rough plausibility check. The U.S. is bigger east-west, but Australia is usually larger north-south.
Brazil is about 10% smaller than China in actual area. I agree that Brazil looks larger on the map to me, but as noted the map is not perfectly equal-area, and it can be difficult to approximate the area from am image accurately, especially when we're comparing irregular shapes such as countries.
Now I'm a bit curious how big each country is on the map in pixels, and whether the perception that Brazil is larger on the map is accurate (i.e. the not-quite-equal-area nature really does favor Brazil), or whether it's the shape of the country that's influencing our approximations and making them inaccurate.
Our perceptions of the countries from other map projections and demographics may also be influencing what we expect. I know Australia's pretty big, but hearing that it's the smallest continent all the time, and knowing that it has less than 1/10th the population of the U.S., probably affects my perception of how large the area should be in comparison.
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People can use the original image to adapt from then.