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South Up, Aotearoa Centred, Equal-Earth Projection Map

Accepted submission by canopic jug at 2023-12-02 09:46:07 from the They-say-the-world-is-spinning-around-I-say-the-world-is-upside-down dept.
News

Standards nerd and technology enthusiast, Terence Eden, has published a South Up, Aotearoa Centred, Equal-Earth Projection Map [shkspr.mobi] which has the south end up and uses the Equal Earth projection to ensure proportional land-mass size. In other words, the globe has been rotated to 150° and created in a multi-stage process mostly using R. The borders are from Natural Earth, the country names from OpenStreetMap, and flags from Twemoji.

Country Names

Natural Earth only provides country names in English ☹ - but it also provides 2 character ISO codes. So I grabbed the country codes and names from OpenStreetMap [openstreetmap.org] and merged them into the data set using R.

The Code

This produces the country borders and names onto an SVG.

Manual placement

I used Boxy [boxy-svg.com] to edit the SVG and place all names in roughly the right place.

Conversion

Inkscape was used to open the resultant SVG at 72dpi. I then used Gimp to autocrop, canvas expanded to 16000x9000, and saved as an uncompressed PNG.

The Emoji wouldn't import to either Gimp or Inkscape. So I viewed the file in Firefox and then printed it to a PDF. That PDF was cropped using pdfcrop` [ctan.org] and then imported to Gimp.

[...]

He has published the map as public domain, CC0 [creativecommons.org], and sells ready print editions.


Original Submission