Natural Earth 1 and Patterson Cylindrical

[vexillus]

Hello,

I'm new to the forum (as well as to mapmaking in general). I need to create a wall map, will be using natural earth data raster as base, and want the result to be in Natural Earth 1 or Patterson Cylindrical projections. Is there any way to do that in Geocart 3 (both projections are not in the supported list)? I know of at least one world map in NE projection made by Strebbe using geocart (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File ... ion_SW.JPG) so I've been wondering how to do that.

Thanks in advance and sorry for my bad English (not a native speaker).

Sam

[daan]

Hello Sam, and welcome to the forums!

Your English is perfect. If you had not told me, I would not have known English is not your native language.

The Natural Earth projection is one of many new projections that will be released in the next version of Geocart. I cannot promise a date yet, but we will start posting in the Prerelease forum when it gets close. Thank you for your patience.

Regards,
— daan

[vexillus]

Daan,

thanks a lot for responding. Guess I'll need to take a closer look at other projections then, who knows there's another one that suits my project better. It's a 2 meters wide floor map of the world for use in interactive session of a history course, btw.

While we're talking of the subject, do you have any suggestion for print resolution? The map will have a dimension of approx. 2000x4000mm, and since it's going be a floor map the viewing distance will be rather close (to be examined from about 2 feet). Do you have any suggestion of minimum/recommended /maximum print resolution for a map of that kind?

Thanks Daan.

Sam

[daan]

Hello Sam.

World map projections are one place where you can exercise your æsthetical preferences responsibly! You should just choose whichever one you prefer and that fits the needs of your format. For a history course, it’s probably not terribly important for the map to preserve area, so you really do have a lot of choices. Perhaps even consider an interrupted format?

The Natural Earth image products have a maximum width of 16,000 pixels. Your map will be 4,000 mm wide, so that means there is no benefit to using a resolution higher than 16,000/4,000 = 4 pixels/mm ≈ 100 dpi. You might choose a higher resolution if you will be placing text on the map so that the text is crisp. Going beyond 12 pixels/mm ≈ 300 dpi really would not benefit anything, I would say. While Geocart will produce the best possible image even at that resolution, the source image just doesn’t have the detail to make it worth the time and massive file size. (I don’t know what hardware you would be using, but on a modern Mac Pro with 24 cores and ample RAM, the imaging time would be about 10 minutes for a typical pseudocylindric projection. The time would be a lot longer on more modest machines.)

Happy mapping!
— daan

[vexillus]

Daan,

thanks a lot for the superb answer! I work on a PC with a i7 CPU and 16GB RAM. We'll see how long it's gonna take for 100 dpi

Sam