These components make maps comprehensible and accessible. How do cartographers create maps? Cartographers use remote sensing and geodetic surveys in combination with aerial cameras and satellites to create maps. Nowadays, modern maps such as Google Street View are made using high-end computer software...
Choosing what to distort and what to keep accurateCartographers must make such choices all the time in mapping the Earth. And they solve the problem in myriad distinct ways. A choice may depend on the use for which the map is intended; "aesthetic" judgment; cultural bias; and practical ...
Oh wait, there’s one teeny little thing. The state borders are still dark grey. We can make those white by editing the the SVG file manually. We open our new SVG in a text editor, and change the stroke to#FFFFFFfrom#221e1faround line 15780. Do something similar on line 15785 for...
OSM is like the Wikipedia of maps. It was created by the largest open community of mappers in the world. Just in New York alone, they’ve digitized close to 2 million infrastructure footprints. But we can promise you this: quality and completeness vary around the world. Let’s wrap thing...
Roads get people where they need to go. In this case, the road needs to take a fairly direct route from the main gate to the castle. Remember that the roads will follow the contours of the terrain. Avoid straight roads in fantasy town maps – they tend not to have heavy earth moving...
A couple of days ago, one of my favorite cartographers, Esri’s John Nelson declared his love for dot density maps. I like dot density maps too, but never really thought through why. John put into words really well what’s so good about them:...
While crafting one is a surefire way to get a map, you can also find them while exploring the world. Maps sometimes appear in treasure chests in shrunken shipwrecks and strongholds, and if you find a village there’s a 50% chance a map will appear in a cartographer’s chest. You can ...
Let’s say you want only the bathymetry from a basemap, and not all the other stuff. What can you do? Well, you break out your capable geo-scissors and geo-crayons (theVector Tile Style Editor) and just snip and color what you like and toss the rest. ...
But now question is, what size should you make the area that you’re mapping? What’s the difference between size and scale? I have noticed that many people, myself included, often use these words interchangeably. But, they really do mean different things, and understanding that can be ver...
UTM, or Universal Transverse Mercator, is a popular method of map projection. Since the Earth is a sphere and maps are generally flat, there are inherent errors when cartographers project the Earth onto a flat map. In a UTM projection, there is a small angular difference between true North...