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Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it

dominik-schwarz.net

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Re: Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it

#141

Post by [deleted] »

fro wrote: post #101
mankyd wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the impression he's not just talking about coloring, but also about what labels to show, how to space and lay them out, etc. He mentions this explicitly: > [...] the real challenge for a map service is to decide what they should and should not display. Google does an excellent job [...]

You can edit all of that with CartoCSS. OP made a great map, but Mapbox Studio really is ideal for a project like this. https://www.mapbox.com/guides/cartocss-in-studio/#studio

[deleted]

Re: Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it

#142

Post by scott_karana »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #15

"OpenStreetMap... the additional work to custom style the maps would be extraordinary" It absolutely wouldn't. Download TileMill or its successor, Mapbox Studio. Adjust the (Carto)CSS. Done. Though for a map of this scale I'd probably work straight from Natural Earth[1] without involving OSM, to be honest. Looks great, anyway. [1] http://www.naturalearthdata.com/

Your thought was my first thought too: but then I realized that Mapbox's products only support Web Mercator projection, which kinda ruins it for me :(

Re: Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it

#143

Post by lazyant »

davegardner wrote: post #52
lazyant wrote: post #41

National Geographic mural map is pretty decent (but yes, it's heavy on borders) http://shop.nationalgeographic.com/ngs/product/maps/wall-map...

The Earth-toned version looks much nicer IMHO http://shop.nationalgeographic.com/ngs/product/maps/wall-map...

I thought this one was smaller but it's actually a bit bigger than the one posted. (I have a smaller version of this one, very nice map)

Re: Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it

#145

Post by [deleted] »

mewo2 wrote: post #84
Retric wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gall-Peters is also a conformation projection that maps north-south maps to the vertical axis, and east-west to the horizontal axis. As to online maps one major advantage is the X-Y scale does not get nearly as messed up at multiple zoom levels. However, online maps alter the projection as you zoom so this is not much of an issue.

Gall-Peters is definitely not conformal. It preserves area, but greatly distorts angles, apart from at the two standard parallels of 45 degrees north and south. This results in the shapes of land masses getting very squished towards the poles (and to a lesser extent, the equator). For an example, look at the shape of Greenland, which appears twice as wide (east-west) as it is tall (north-south), when in reality it's…

[deleted]

Re: Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it

#146

Post by erroneousfunk »

pricechild wrote: post #65
UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He only had a Mercator map source data. Unless you know how to switch Google Maps into Peters Projection mode? I am surprised people who read the article are even asking this considering how much he struggled even to get the source image (and how he ultimately wound up manually stitching together print screens).

Incase anyone really does want to do this: http://www.gdal.org/gdalwarp.html is awesome.

But he had the map data and the text data all compressed into a single image -- the text would have been warped as well.

Re: Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it

#147

Post by teh_klev »

skrause wrote: post #24
dietrichepp wrote: post #7

This guy "loves world maps" but chose Mercator for the wall of his room? I guess there's no accounting for taste. There are hundreds of projections to choose from, why choose the one optimized for navigation by compass ?

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/977/

And obligatory West Wing "Gall Peters Projection" clip:

"What the hell is that?"

"It's where you've been living this whole time"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVX-PrBRtTY

Re: Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it

#148

Post by maxerickson »

natural219 wrote: post #140
fro wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can edit all of that with CartoCSS. OP made a great map, but Mapbox Studio really is ideal for a project like this. https://www.mapbox.com/guides/cartocss-in-studio/#studio

It doesn't follow that because CartoCSS/Mapbox studios is "editable", "customizable", and "easy", that the specific combinations of configuration and adjustment available would meet his complex criterion of minimizing time, effort, money, and aesthetics. I'd imagine Google Maps is optimized to a T for all of the tiny specific label placements you want, and I'm not convinced from the one-off choice it would have been…

There is indeed no great solution to 'prominence' in the OSM data. There have been efforts to add population information to places, and to promote so called villages into so called towns when they are locally important, but those efforts have not been completely systematic (so they might be better in Austria than Minnesota, and even worse in Wisconsin).

Which is one reason to turn to the Natural Earth data, it has been curated more systematically than OSM.

Re: Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it

#149

Post by [deleted] »

vilhelm_s wrote: post #124
Retric wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Mercator projection (ed: is a Conformal map, but) it also greatly distorts both angles and shapes as you approach the poles. The trivial example is to walk a square mile (N,W,S,E) you would expect the opposite sides to be at 45deg angle, but on Mercator the sides get stretched so a square in the real world can have a 10+:1 or even 100:1 side lengths on a Mercator map. The property they both preserve is points north…

It preserves angles locally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformal_map

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Re: Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it

#150

Post by ianbicking »

derefr wrote: post #104

This article's throwaway notion of glow-in-the-dark pins has got me thinking about how to make a surface with light-up LED pins that can be stuck in arbitrarily. - You could use (cleverly-braided+insulated) regular LEDs if there was a breadboard or something behind the map, but that'd be both huge and inconvenient. - Maybe LEDs with inductive coils and a large backing induction mat? - Given a metallic backing, and a…

Maybe put a strong light behind the map, and use a fiberglass pin? Kind of like a Lite-Brite.
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