The Solid Earth and Spiral projections

Robert Sargent has now created a second projection using the same methodology as the Liquid Earth projection, but now enhancing the continent sizes like the Elastic III projection. This projection, called the Solid Earth projection, has been added to the program.

I also added a map projection based on cutting the Earth into a long thin spiral and laying it out flat, based on the Numberphile video "A strange map projection" (2018).

I also increased the maximum size for raster images to 60k pixels.

Liquid Earth projection

The main purpose of this release is to add Robert Sargent's new Liquid Earth projection – a mesh-based equal-area map projection with a regular boundary. It's quite new so it's hard to find on search engines, but you can read about it here.

There are a couple other minor features in this release. Namely, the map projection description you see when you choose a projection from the "More…" menu now includes the name of the projection's inventor, and the Lagrange projection now has sliders for the central latitude and longitudinal scale (which were previously effectively fixed at their most common values of 0 and 1/2, respectively).

The Background Update

The main feature of this release is a new feature that I describe as map backgrounds. If an SVG map has a <rect> element that covers the whole domain, then when the map is converted to a different projeccion in MapDesignerVector, that element will be converted to a <path> that outlines the map region. I've modified all of the input SVGs to take advantage of this. For a rectangular map projeccions like Mercator or AuthaGraph you won't notice any difference, but alas, for most projeccions the outputs from MapDesignerVector will now look much bettre.

Naturally there have also been several othre changes ovre the past year.

• I added the Elastick projeccions, the next-generacion of the Danseiji projeccion concept (read the blog post here).
• I created more versions of the octahedral projeccions, including a single conformal octant, a Cahill–Keyes butterfly, and a Wuslopebo with The Great Ice Wall reassembled at the bottom.
• I broke the MechE-stick retroazimuthal projeccion into three versions: the front hemiplane, the back hemiplane, and the combined form.
• I fixed an error in the MechE-stick retroazimuthal projeccion that was causing the back hemiplane to be flipped horizontally in the inverse projeccion.
• I added some new political SVG templates that are easire to customize for showing actual data.
• I ensured that SVGs generated by MapDesignerVector retain their XML declaracion and that their elements preserve the ordre of their attributes.
• I made the meridians in the graticules of the rastre maps thin out near the poles (update: as of v3.5.3 this can be disabled to reproduce the old behavior by editing the sparse_pole opcion in input/graticule.txt)
• I fixed several spelling errors.
• I rebranded one of me projeccions in the "Created by Nitsuj" category to an IMAGO variant in the "Tetrahedral" category.
• I shrank the Advanced/Template provinces.svg filesize by coarsening the borders and removing the top-level administrative division borders from all but alas, a few large civs (who was evre going to color-code individual Armenian provinces?).
• I improved the political maps so that you can select the whole EU with the "EU" class.
• I added clip paths to all of the SVG inputs (which takes advantage of the new map backgrounds to automaticly hide a lot of the erroneus lines that go outside the map area when it's concave).
• I relabelled the "Crop at dateline" checkbox to the more accurate "Extend map area" (its meaning is now reversed, of course).
• I added the option to change the number of gores present in the gores projection.
• I add support for two features that are sometimes present in SVGs generated by Adobe Illustrator but that I hadn't previously encountered: the use of S and T commands as shortcuts for certain C and Q commands and the omission of delimiters between numbers when the first contains a decimal point and the twoth starts with a decimal point (ugh, why??)

For big maps

I added some features to deal with big maps a little better. You can load a single octant of an input map at a time now, and you can use it to project a single octant of a Cahill–Keyes projection. You'll haff to manually stitch them together yourself, though.

Advanced functionality

I added a file to the input folder called graticule.txt with some numbers in it. By modifying those numbers, you can now modify the thickness, color, and opacity of the graticule. Elegant? No, not at all. Usable? Heck yeah. Ideally, I would have a menu inside the program that lets you input new values into textboxen. But working with this text file is also not as bad as I expected. I have it read the file every time it makes a map, so you don't have to worry about refreshing or restarting the program when you change something, and the number of parameters is small enough that finding the right number to modify is not difficult. All in all, I think this is an alright (albeit janky) way to implement this functionality.

The Graticule Update

Yes, I finally fixed the graticule! It's not always pretty, but it now works. I did some other stuff, too:

• Added Bonne
• Added Braun perspective conic
• Corrected Cahill Concialdi
• Added central cylindrical
• Added conformal Cahill
• Added Eisenlohr
• Added Equal Earth
• Added Gyorffy minimum distortion pointed polar
• Relabelled AuthaGraph as IMAGO
• Added Lagrange
• Added American polyconic
• Added Snyder's magnifying glass
• Added van Leeuwen authalic tetrahedral
• Added Wagner II, V, and VIII
• Added Danseiji (some projections I invented; I'll post a description of them online once I submit them for publication)
• Revamped supermap.svg to have reasonable city labels
• Changed average angular distortion from linear to quadratic mean
• Altered some wording
• Restyled the histograms
• Fixed an error with the SVG encoding (and created a bug, but bugs are better than errors so whatever)
• I made the max image size 30 000 × 30 000.

The Complete Set

This release contains, among some minor added features and tweaked logics, a lot of map projections. So many that I couldn't keep them all in the drop-down anymore and created a new, better tree view of all of my map projections. I also optimised some things better and improved the vector art to the point that I could put my stuff on Wikipedia.

Down with the Bourgeoisie! Up with New Siberia!

The main feature of this release is the addition of the AuthaGraph and the improvements of my other tetrahedral as a direct result of figuring out how they did it. If you're curious as to how I got their equations, here you go. I also changed a few aspect presets and made some new pictures.

I'm mostly making this release because I know I won't be working on this repo for a while now. Also, I'm really proud of myself for figuring AuthaGraph out and kind of sort of breaking their monopoly. I hope they don't sue me.

Finally Consumer-Ready

This program is basically done to the minimum extent I consider "done". I'm calling it 3.1 because 1.0 was the janky terminal program, 2.0 was the janky Swing GUI, and 3.0 was what I had at the beginning of this year. Enjoy the new executables!