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> I've spent 1,5 years working on this project So wouldn't it make more sense to just buy a huge display then? :)
Or a decent high res LED projector, would have cost less than the foam board he stuck the map to and he could have it done in a day.
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 ?
Maybe because he used Google Maps, and they use Mercator?
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought that too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection Which map projections would you choose? A difficult decision: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_map_projections
Robinson or Winkel-tripel like National Geographic does.
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 ?
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 get a reasonably accurate representation of the actual shape of features. This is generally not true for most more fashionable projections, which will stretch and skew things, so they don't always look great when zoomed.
In general with map projections, you have to make a compromise between global properties and local properties. Choosing Mercator means going full-on for local quality, at the expense of the global map being quite distorted. This makes it great for zoomable web maps, because most of the time the global map is just used to find the area you're actually looking for.
Now, you could argue that for a living-room wall, you want something that looks good globally. If it was my wall, I'd agree with you. However, this guy seems to be really interested in local detail. He worries about his four-point fonts becoming blurry, and about having as many small villages marked on the map as possible. If he's interested in that kind of detail, then I think he probably cares far more about local properties than the kind of global properties that would bother me or you.
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 ?
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).
I can understand why someone wouldn't want to set up their own tile rendering system (and hence not use something like OSM with whatever projection they want), but it likely would have been less work than screenshots.
I wish someone would have recommended him to tweak one of many available OSM styles in TileMill. He also could have exported the layer in any tile shape, projection, and resolution using mapnik. You can even render to vector trivially, which comes in very handy for any printable pdfs. https://github.com/mapbox/osm-bright https://github.com/mapnik/mapnik/wiki/MapnikRenderers
The project was started 1,5 years ago at the time of writing the article.
Feel free to ask me any gis or web mapping questions as demiurge@irc.freenode.org, I'd love to facilitate more beautiful maps out there.
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 ?
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 ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or a decent high res LED projector, would have cost less than the foam board he stuck the map to and he could have it done in a day.
Given his objectives specifically included high resolution enough to see details on the map up close, even a 4K projector would have fallen far short of this.