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Cartography

Summary: Notes on maps, mapmaking, and cartographic design tools. Last updated: 2026-10-15

2026

  • Language Dots: Interactive map of the languages people speak at home in each country, using dots sized by number of speakers, built mainly from national census data with estimates where none are published. Related: Web_Mapping, Data. Keywords: language map, dot map, pie chart, dialects, census, interactive map

  • Phosphor - Color Ramp Generator: Joshua Stevens' color palette tool that builds gradients with perceptually uniform lightness in OKLab, with colorblind simulation and export to Python, R, QGIS, ArcGIS Pro, and GDAL. A ColorBrewer alternative. Related: QGIS, Python. Keywords: color ramp, palette, OKLab, ColorBrewer alternative, colorblind, cartography

  • The Week Seattle Hit 108: Animated 3D map of the June 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome, draping hourly ERA5-Land temperatures over USGS terrain using Milos Popovic's Forge3D, with Python for labels and timeline. Related: Climate, Python. Keywords: Forge3D, 3D terrain map, animation, heat dome, ERA5-Land, cartography

  • How We Built the World's Prettiest Auto-Generated Transit Maps: Transit's approach to auto-generating attractive transit maps by processing routes in pixel space — drawing lines thickly then skeletonizing them to find shared segments, using integer linear programming to minimize crossings, and rounding with circular arcs. Keywords: transit maps, auto-generation, skeletonization, pixel space, ILP, map design

2025

  • Weaving Space: Multivariate Maps: FOSS4G 2025 presentation introducing weavingspace, a Python module using tiling and weaving techniques to combine multiple choropleth maps into single multivariate visualizations. Related: Python, CNG. Keywords: cartography, multivariate, choropleth, Python, visualization, FOSS4G

  • Lonboard Visualization - Climate Projection: FOSS4G Auckland 2025 notebooks demonstrating high-performance geospatial visualization with Lonboard using GPU-accelerated WebGL rendering. Related: Web_Mapping, CNG, Python. Keywords: cartography, visualization, Lonboard, WebGL, GPU, FOSS4G, Python

2024

  • Map Warper - Online Georeferencer: Free, open-source online tool for georeferencing historical maps and overlaying them on modern maps. Related: QGIS. Keywords: cartography, georeferencing, historical maps, online tool

  • Create City Map Print Poster from OSM: Python tool generating beautiful minimalist map posters for any city from OpenStreetMap data with customizable themes and high-resolution export. Related: Web_Mapping, Python, Data. Keywords: cartography, OSM, poster, city maps, Python, visualization

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