Help:Producing maps with xplanet

This help page is a how-to guide.

It explains concepts or processes used by the Wikipedia community. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels of consensus.

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.

Getting xplanet

See the project page for downloads

Getting started

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

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

How generally to zoom in and project an image suitable for use as a map, and save as jpeg

How to plot locations on the map with labels

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)