Map-Projections

A class to create custom maps of the Earth's surface. There are thousands of combinations of color-schemes, projections, and aspects. Includes Mercator, Gall-Peters, Orthographic, Peirce Quincuncial, and More!

Installation

If you are a fancy Windows user, I recommend the convenient fancy Windows binaries. Double-click to install them and then keep pressing buttons until something good happens. If you see a map, you're in the right place.

If you are not on Windows or are otherwise not fancy enough to deserve such executables, simply double-click on the .jar files in the main directory and, if you have Java installed (10/10 would recommend), it should just run without any set-up.

You could also compile and run the source code, but if you do, there are a few dependencies. All of them can be obtained as .jar files:

• Apache Commons Mathematics Library
• Java Tools for Experimental Mathematics "ellipticFunctions" package, which requires their "mfc" package

Usage

There are three executable files and three other runnable Java scripts. These are, in order:

• MapDesignerRaster.jar – The original program. Create custom oblique raster images of the Earth's surface using a variety of algorithms called projections.
• MapDesignerVector.jar – The same idea, but working in vector images instead in case you want to cut a vinyl sticker or something.
• MapAnalyzer.jar – See graphs and figures quantifying the amount of scale and angular distortion present in each map projection.
• MapPlotter.java – Plot a large group of map projections by the amount of distortion they produce.
• MapOptimizer.java – Run gradient descent on parametric projections to minimize their distortion.
• MapExplainer.java – Generate an HTML blurb outlining and displaying every map projection.

The executable applications all have similar layouts that let you select an input equirectangular map, a projection, an aspect (where the North Pole is situated with respect to the projection), and parameters if applicable. Go crazy! There are a practically unlimited number of combinations.

The runnable scripts just kind of work on their own. Those ones aren't really meant for mass consumption.

Wherefore?

I'll write a little blurb here later.

For some examples, check out the output folder. For more information, go to jkunimune15.github.io/Map-Projections.

Credits

While I wrote all of the code in this repository myself, and I created several of the simpler images from scratch, other people did help. Here's a comprehensive list.

• The NASA for Basic.jpg, Satellite.jpg, and Altitude.jpg
• Tom Patterson for Pastel.jpg and Rivers.jpg
• RokerHRO for the indicatrix layer of Tissot.jpg
• The CIA for Basic.svg
• Crates for Landmasses.svg
• Eric Gaba for Tissot.svg
• The Apache Commons for their complex mathematics code
• Technische Universität Berlin for their complex mathematics code
• Wikipedia for their impressive collection of map projection information and equations