maply

maply is a Jupyter notebook widget for quickly drawing shapes on a blank XY canvas and converting them into shapely geometries, WKT strings, GeoJSON, or a GeoDataFrame.

It is built for geospatial engineers who need to prototype and test spatial algorithms, and want a fast way to hand-craft geometry for minimal reproducible examples — without typing out coordinate tuples by hand.

Features

• Draw points, lines, polygons (with holes), rectangles, and circles on an abstract XY canvas.
• Build multipart geometries / collections.
• Pull results straight into Python:
  • canvas.geometries → list of shapely geometries
  • canvas.wkt → WKT strings
  • canvas.geojson → GeoJSON dict
  • canvas.to_geodataframe() → geopandas GeoDataFrame (optional dependency)
• Or draw on a real interactive map with GeoCanvas (ipyleaflet), including pushing Python geometry back onto the map to inspect and edit it.

Install

pip install -e .              # core
pip install -e ".[geopandas]" # + GeoDataFrame export
pip install -e ".[geo]"       # + GeoCanvas interactive map (ipyleaflet)
pip install -e ".[dev]"       # + test / lint tooling

Quick start

from maply import MaplyCanvas

canvas = MaplyCanvas(width=600, height=400)
canvas          # draw shapes interactively in the output cell

canvas.wkt          # -> ['POLYGON ((...))', 'POINT (...)']
canvas.geometries   # -> [<shapely Polygon>, <shapely Point>]

Draw on a real map

GeoCanvas wraps an ipyleaflet map (pan, zoom, basemaps, draw/edit toolbar) and connects it to the same conversion layer — in both directions:

from shapely.geometry import Polygon
from maply import GeoCanvas

geo = GeoCanvas(center=(37.77, -122.42), zoom=12)

# Python -> map: inspect / edit a geometry on the map
geo.add_geometry(Polygon([(-122.45, 37.75), (-122.40, 37.75),
                          (-122.40, 37.79), (-122.45, 37.79)]))
geo

# map -> Python (after drawing/editing)
geo.wkt
geo.to_geodataframe(crs="EPSG:3857")   # optional reprojection

See examples/quickstart.ipynb for a full walkthrough.

Status

Alpha. MaplyCanvas uses planar XY (no CRS). GeoCanvas draws in lon/lat (EPSG:4326) on a live map and is available with the geo extra.