CLClashTheBunny·Sep 23, 2019
D3 does this amazingly well: https://github.com/d3/d3-geo-projection/blob/master/README.m...
In Folding Paper Globesd3
d3-geo-projection
JavaScript2015–2019
d3 / d3-geo-projection
d3-geo-projection
Extended geographic projections for d3-geo.
3Distinct people
3Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.2KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Extended geographic projections for d3-geo.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year3 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2015-05-30 20:22:48 UTC to 2019-09-23 17:08:09 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
3 sourcesUnusual map projections like these are often curiosities, but the can also be useful for certain topics, like mapping migrations[1][2][3] or showing airline routes[4][5].
[1]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map-of-human-migrati...
[2]: https://nordpil.com/static/images/redknot_migration.png
[3]: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0603/feature2/map.html
[4]: https://imgur.com/5TFPcDa
[5]: https://imgur.com/6X91323
Additionally, this project is a generalization of a feature that already existed in D3 (clipping spherical polygons to map boundaries -- previously you could only do this if the boundary in question was the antimeridian or a small circle centered at the origin). That generalization will make it easier to use some more common map projections that were already supported in d3-geo-projection[5] like as Goode's interrupte
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d homolosine and Mollweide projections. These are useful projections for showing things like population density[6] where you care about preventing distortion in the landmasses but don't care about the oceans. While these projections were possible before, they required the use of SVG clip-paths and other tricks to prevent drawing outside the map bounds. In theory they could now be simplified using the polygon clipping implemented in d3-geo-polygon.
[5]: https://github.com/d3/d3-geo-projection
[6]: http://www.jakelow.com/essays/mapping-the-world-population
The problem is that Google Maps has become a very convenient always available source for maps, and the brand is highly trusted. Moreover, many other online mapping services have adopted the same projection.
Students (or whoever else) who might have previously gone to look up a region of the world on a globe, large paper map, or atlas are now turning to sites like Google Maps instead. The market for high quality paper maps has fallen quite a bit as more convenient online maps become the go-to source for answering all sorts of geographic questions.
Moreover, Mercator maps are turning up as the basis for many other tools. For instance, several online map collections have started georeferencing and reprojecting historical maps onto a Mercator projection, saving them as raster tiles, and allowing visitors to pan and zoom around on those reproj
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ected maps, Google-Maps style. Instead of looking at various original maps with region-specific projections, now the viewer is getting more and more exposure to just Mercator maps.
If you look around the web, there are many examples of good maps with reasonable projections, but there are also many many examples of people using the Mercator projection in wholly inappropriate contexts. For example, I see Mercator choropleths of US statistical data quite frequently, which should be using something like an Albers equal-area conic projection instead. (http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/3734308)
On the bright side, work like the D3 guys (Mike Bostock & Jason Davies) and others have been doing has made it easier than ever to construct nice web maps in all sorts of projections, without shelling out big bucks for fancy GIS software.
http://www.jasondavies.com/maps/
https://github.com/d3/d3-geo-projection/