change mercator projection

[fedhere]

Can I change the projection from Mercator which is biased to enlarge northern territories to Gall-Peters or something more equitable?

[cdauth]

Unfortunately not, and I doubt that this will ever be supported. The main reason for this is that all the map renderings come from third-party providers (such as OpenStreetMap), and those only provide them in Mercator projection.

My first instinct (without giving this too deep of a thought yet) would also be that the Mercator projection is the most suitable for interactive maps like this. When zoomed out and viewing the whole world, there is indeed a large distortion that makes areas closer to the poles seem much larger. However, the further you zoom in, the less distortion there will be on your screen. I feel like looking at the whole world is something that is rarely done on FacilMap. It is done maybe when getting a general overview over the geography of the world out of curiosity, or sometimes for manually zooming to a specific place on earth. The main use cases of FacilMap happen much more zoomed in: planning a trip or collecting points of interest in a specific geographic area.

If I understand Gall–Peters right, it would maybe make the sizes of the continents more proportional when viewing the whole world, but when actually zooming in, the map would be very distorted (vertically stretched in most places), except – ironically – in central Europe and other places on the same latitude.

I would be curious though to hear more details about your thoughts on this. What are you intending to use FacilMap for where you think that another projection would be useful?

[fedhere]

This recent post I saw reminded me of this conversation. Basically any application where one does not want to deemphasize the participation of the global south would call for non-mercator projection when plotting large regions of the world - a direct quote from the link I posted “Africa is misrepresented on the world maps, and it’s not just a matter of geography — it’s a reflection of how the world views the continent,”

I am sudprised then that a functionality that has tru sociological and equity impact is overlooked by the developer

https://www.iflscience.com/the-world-map-as-you-know-it-is-misleading-now-africa-wants-to-change-that-80584

[cdauth]

You have not reacted to the points that I have brought up. Everyone agrees that the Mercator projection distorts the dimensions and especially makes the Global South appear underrepresented. However, there are many more problems to be solved and questioned to be answered before something like this can be implemented. Which projection should we use? Where can we find map tiles in this projection (I don’t have the time, skills and resources to create them myself)? How should we deal with the distortion at higher zoom levels? Is it really worth all the effort for an app where one rarely looks at the whole world, or doesn’t it make more sense to focus on this issue in world maps (posters and online)?