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 (note: will upload Windows binaries in next release). 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.

Features

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.

Dependencies

While the excecutables are standalone, and the Jars require only Java, the source code makes use of several external libraries. These are

• Apache commons math3
• "mfc"
• "ellipticFunctions"

To be perfectly honest, I don't remember where I got most of these. Oops. It looks like they might be German. I would recommend looking the de.jtem package from (math.tu-berlin.de)[www3.math.tu.berlin.de/jtem/].

Wherefore?

I'll write a little blurb here later.

For more information go to jkunimune15.github.io/Map-Projections.