6a6b9eac34
I changed up the inputs a bit. Many of the raster inputs are now PNGs; I decided that even though they take up more space, JPEG artifacts aren't worth the few extra megabytes, especially since JPEG artifacts that get magnified by projection are really annoying. I touched up the graticule SVGs by removing some annoying "z"s and thinning the lines. I realised that Political.png was really bad, so I color-coded Political.svg and converted that to a PNG. I don't know why it's taken me so long to find a decent way of doing that. Oh, yeah, and Political.svg exists now. The default "Basic.svg" is what was "Compound.svg". It makes the two map designers more consistent. I also updated the README accordingly.
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.png, Satellite.jpg, and Altitude.png
- Tom Patterson for Pastel.jpg and Rivers.png
- RokerHRO for the indicatrix layer of Tissot.jpg
- Crates for Landmasses.svg and the landmass layer of Basic.svg
- The CIA for Political.svg and Political.png.
- The Apache Commons for their complex mathematics code
- Technische Universität Berlin for their complex mathematics code
- AuthaGraph Co., Ltd. for their vague information about their map projection, which inspired several of my own.
- Wikipedia for their impressive collection of map projection information and equations
