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PnmMercator User Manual(0) PnmMercator User Manual(0)
NAME
pnmmercator - transform a worldmap from rectangular projection to Mercator projection and
vice-versa
SYNOPSIS
pnmmercator [-inverse] [-nomix] [-[v]verbose] [filename]
Minimum unique abbreviation of option is acceptable. You may use double hyphens instead
of single hyphen to denote options.
DESCRIPTION
This program is part of Netpbm(1).
The pnmmercator utility, converts a rectangular projection worldmap to a Mercator projec-
tion format, as used for maps.google.com and many other online maps. The map used as
input for pnmmercator must have rows for -90 to 90 degrees latitude and columns for -180
to +180 degrees longitude. The file will typically be twice as wide as high, but this is
not a requirement. The output file will be using the Mercator projection
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection> and will get double the height of the
input file.
Maps using the Mercator projection are stretched more the closer a row is to the North or
South Pole. The last few degrees (> 85 or < -85 degrees) are not part of a Mercator map at
all because they would be stretched too much and the rows close to the edge will show
banding, because they originate from the same row in the original map.
To overcome this, the program will by default do interpolation of pixel colors, which will
eliminate the banding effect, but will cause some blurring of the output. With the -nomix
option, this interpolation of colors isn't applied. You can obtain the highest quality
output by starting with an input map of high resolution, so that you can follow the pnm-
mercator transformation with a pamscale reduction in size.
This program can also convert a Mercator projection map back to a rectangular projection
based. As said, the Mercator map doesn't have information about the latitudes close to
the poles. Therefore the top rows in the output image will be identical and copied from
the row corresponding with latitude of 85 degrees. The same at the bottom of the map.
Pnmmercator doesn't have any provision for scaling the image. You can scale by piping the
output of the program through Netpbm programs such as pamscale.
You can find maps to be used as input at flatplanet.sourceforge.net(1) or uic.edu/pape
<http://www.evl.uic.edu/pape/data/Earth/> .
The point of a Mercator projection map is that compass directions work on it. If you draw
a straight line northeast from some point on the Mercator map, the line traces the course
you would sail if you sailed a compass bearing of northeast from that spot. Naturally,
primitive navigators appreciated that. The biggest drawback of Mercator is that areas to
the north and south appear much larger than they are in real life. For example, Greenland
appears to be larger than South America even though it only a ninth as large. Note that
areas away from the equator are stretched north-south as well as east-west.
A rectangular projection is one where vertical distance is proportional to angular lati-
tude distance of the represented area and horizontal distance is proportional to angular
longitude.
PARAMETERS
filename is the name of the input file. If you don't specify this, pnmmercator reads the
image from standard Input.
OPTIONS
-inverse
With this option a conversion from Mercator to degrees is applied.The output image
will have half the height of the input map.
-nomix
Default behaviour is that color blending is applied in between two adjacent rows.
If you specify the -nomix parameter there is no blending. The consequence is a
banding at the top and bottom of the map. With this option, the output map will
also consist of exactly the same colors as the input.
-verbose and -vverbose
This parameter outputs some additional information. If you double the 'v', it will
output debug data about the lat/long degree and Mercator conversions.
SEE ALSO
pnm(1) and pamscale(1) ppmglobe(1)
HISTORY
pnmmercator was new in Netpbm 10.49 (December 2009).
AUTHORS
Willem van Schaik (of pnmtopng/pngtopnm fame) wrote this program in October 2009 and sug-
gested it for inclusion in Netpbm.
DOCUMENT SOURCE
This manual page was generated by the Netpbm tool 'makeman' from HTML source. The master
documentation is at
http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/pnmmercator.html
netpbm documentation October 2009 PnmMercator User Manual(0)
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