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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

#161

Post by nevi-me »

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

Or for the interested, TileMill would be better as you can print exports in PDF as vectors. I spent a great deal of time trying to manually create transit maps for one of our 'archaic' transit agencies, and this was before Mapbox Studio's time. I use Studio a bit, but TileMill does the better job as it caters better for offline usage.

I do agree with others though that it would have been a great amount of effort to invest in understanding CartoCSS for his requirements, and getting to create it.

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

#162

Post by smackfu »

bedatadriven wrote: post #14

FWIW, a shameless plug for the company where I had my first programming job as a 17 year old: www.marketmaps.com. They will print and ship HUGE maps without a moment's hesitation. Choose a nice world map with a decent projection or send them a PDF and they'll overnight to you :-)

Interesting they don't ship paper maps over a certain size, just laminated ones.

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

#164

Post by oh_sigh »

amscanne wrote: post #155
jamesfe wrote: post #102

I was formerly a cartographer with the military; I have lots of experience with large format maps, both of the world and of single countries (usually Iraq). It was fun to read an article about a map that wasn't hastily tacked up on a wall with nails or duct tape. A few notes: - Paper sags over time. Good thing he mounted it to a board - We printed on tyvek for water/rip proofing, which was interesting. It's surprisin…

Out of curiosity, what projection would you go with?

Dymaxion would be disorienting but it would certainly get you thinking

Example: http://basementgeographer.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/uap...

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

#165

Post by Retric »

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

Yea, nm I was wrong. Shapes do get distorted near the poles, but at fixed latitude the distortion decreases as their size decreases.

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

#166

Post by remarkEon »

dba7dba wrote: post #139
jamesfe wrote: post #102

I was formerly a cartographer with the military; I have lots of experience with large format maps, both of the world and of single countries (usually Iraq). It was fun to read an article about a map that wasn't hastily tacked up on a wall with nails or duct tape. A few notes: - Paper sags over time. Good thing he mounted it to a board - We printed on tyvek for water/rip proofing, which was interesting. It's surprisin…

"This reminded me of Colonels coming to me in the military saying - "I want all of Iraq on my wall at 1:50,000" and as a junior enlisted man saying something, very respectfully, like "Well, sir, Iraq is about 900km from top to bottom, so that's 900,000m, and at 1:50,000 that's about 18m from top to bottom. How high are your ceilings?" Ahaha... I am really curious though. What were their responses? Just do it? Or was…

My experience with digital maps is that they were always a complement to my paper map, not a replacement. Sometimes you'd be traveling long distances and a 1:25,000 or 1:50,000 became too cumbersome to carry once you got out of the truck...so following along on a digital surface made some sense. But at present I think you're correct that digital maps aren't ready to replace the paper form at the tactical level. From a planning perspective, satellite overlays are extremely useful and taking a printed version of selected imagery with me on a patrol happened pretty much every time, especially if we were looking for something specific or searching buildings etc. Platoon leaders end up getting pretty good at arts and crafts...we'd spend a lot of time cutting and pasting maps and imagery together to get something as useful as possible, but just small enough that it wasn't too terrible to have in your cargo pocket or tucked into your plate carrier.

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

#167

Post by FireBeyond »

dagw wrote: post #126
kej wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably overkill, but you could get a similar effect with a high resolution projector aimed at the map. Light up certain spots with color, and leave the rest black.

Except that if someone walks up to look at the map they'll block the projector beam and you lose the effect

I wonder if you could mount it on the ceiling, or even in, angled steeply (so you'd have to get very close to create shadows). For imagery, distortion would make this impossible, but if you're just projecting white light...

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

#168

Post by malandrew »

This is awesome. I've always wanted a massive dymaxion project and never thought of going about it this way.

Now I need to figure out how to convert open-street-map tiles into a dymaxion projection, which I can then print and mount on triangular boards.

http://www.learnwebmapping.com/2012/01/dymaxion-web-mapping/

http://indiemaps.com/blog/2011/04/dymaxion-projection-in-ope...

http://www.gislounge.com/dymaxion-map-projection/

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

#170

Post by ggchappell »

cousin_it wrote: post #89
mewo2 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't believe I'm doing this, but I think I'm going to defend Mercator here. The Mercator projection was indeed originally designed for compass navigation, but the reason it's still used for web mapping is slightly different. The Mercator projection is conformal . What this means is that angles (and hence in some sense shapes) are preserved locally. When we zoom in on a small section of the Mercator projection, we…

If I understand correctly, Mercator is the only conformal projection where north is always up, no matter where you zoom in. That makes it nice for online maps. If you relax the "north is up" requirement, there's tons of conformal projections that look nice: http://www.progonos.com/furuti/MapProj/Normal/ProjConf/projC... I really like the "classic Guyou" projection: http://www.progonos.com/furuti/MapProj/Normal/ProjCo…

Very nice links. Thanks for posting.
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