Help:Producing maps with xplanet
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Producing maps with xplanet is a wikipedia tutorial showing how to use xplanet as a piece of GIS kit, to make map images suitable for use on wikipedia and other such websites. By the end of the tutorial, you should be able to quickly and accurately produce maps of any region suitable for publication.
See the project page for downloads
Getting started edit
Typical command-line use of xplanet (this all goes on one line)
xplanet.exe -projection orthographic -config script.txt -latitude 52.25 -longitude 21.00 -num_times 1 -geometry 600x600 -output xplanet_image.jpeg -radius 70 -fontsize 16
Result:
Script files edit
Some of the map data is typically stored in a script file (a text file on your computer) - the script I used for the above map was simply:
[earth] grid=true grid1=10 grid2=10 shade=100
shade=100 is important, because it says that nighttime regions should be shaded at 100% of daytime illumination. When drawing maps, the nighttime shading isn't normally needed, so set that to 100 to turn it off
| Projection |
ancient azimuthal hemisphere lambert mercator mollweide peters orthographic rectangular |
| config | data script |
| latitude, longitude | where to centre an orthographic projection |
| num_times | must be 1 (stop xplanet running continuously) |
| geometry | width and height of the desired image |
| output | where to save the image |
| radius | radius of the earth, as a percentage of image width (make this bigger to zoom in) |
| more... | try the docs here and here |
Try it again, setting the latitude to 90, shows the north polar area
How to produce "globe images of earth showing where a region is located edit
How generally to zoom in and project an image suitable for use as a map, and save as jpeg edit
How to plot locations on the map with labels edit
City locations are available for download - see xplanet site, and can be plotted on maps (as can anything you can generate a lat/long/name textfile for)
How to draw country-borders using the arcfile list edit
See the URL below for some examples
Xplanet sample output: with markerfiles produced with weather scripts
Xplanet sample output: hurricane information using arcfile options. Storm data collected by scripts.
Drawing on maps tutorial edit
plot significant points, then use them as template in GIMP?
Misc edit
