MapProjectionAnimator

The command line tool MapProjectionAnimator makes possible to compare map projections and render animations from such comparisons.

Scientific Publications

An overview of the package and the ideas behind it can be found in:

• FB Mocnik: An Empirically Derived Structure Theorem for the Relative Distortion of Cartographic Projections, and a Visual Method for Comparing Them The Cartographic Journal, 2026

Installation

To install MapProjectionAnimator, you will need python3 and pip (How to install pip). Then execute:

pip install MapProjectionAnimator

On some operating systems, pip for python3 is named pip3:

pip3 install MapProjectionAnimator

Optionally, the font Helvetica can be added to the root directory in case the operating system does not offer this font. The file must be named Helvetica.ttc.

Usage

mpa clean
mpa --verbose codomain # 20s # 1m 8s
mpa projection # 13m 38s # 132m 31s
mpa video --high-quality # 6m 27s # 294m 50s

mpa clean
mkdir _output-logs
{ time mpa --verbose codomain > _output-logs/log-codomain.txt 2> _output-logs/log-codomain-error.txt ; } 2> _output-logs/log-codomain-time.txt

mkdir _output
{ time mpa projection > _output/log-projection.txt 2> _output/log-projection-error.txt ; } 2> _output/log-projection-time.txt
{ time mpa video --high-quality > _output/log-video.txt 2> _output/log-video-error.txt ; } 2> _output/log-video-time.txt
mv _output _output-rescale-by-codomains

mkdir _output
{ time mpa projection --no-rescale > _output/log-projection.txt 2> _output/log-projection-error.txt ; } 2> _output/log-projection-time.txt
{ time mpa video --high-quality > _output/log-video.txt 2> _output/log-video-error.txt ; } 2> _output/log-video-time.txt
mv _output _output-no-rescale

mkdir _output
{ time mpa projection --rescale-by-geometries > _output/log-projection.txt 2> _output/log-projection-error.txt ; } 2> _output/log-projection-time.txt
{ time mpa video --high-quality > _output/log-video.txt 2> _output/log-video-error.txt ; } 2> _output/log-video-time.txt
mv _output _output-rescale-by-geometries

Maintanance Notice

This software should not be considered stable. In particular, the algorithm can result in slightly different results on different platforms due to rounding errors, and adding additional map projections might not work as expected.

Author

This application is written and maintained by Franz-Benjamin Mocnik, mail@mocnik-science.net.

(c) by Franz-Benjamin Mocnik, 2023–2026.

License

The code is licensed under the MIT license.