Alternative projections not working?

[rbeiko]

I have been trying to generate alternative projections for some of our example maps, but I have been getting errors in some cases, and just weird outcomes in others.

For example, setting projection to Albers Conic and then trying to load the influenza world map yields a failed assertion in shared_ptr.hpp, line 414. In other cases I just get a rectangular map with weird dimensions.

Has anyone else noticed this? Any ideas about what might be going wrong?

[donovan-h-parks]

The projection stuff hasn't been used/tested in a long time. It is also currently incompatible with maps generated using MapMaker since the coordinate system used by NaturalEarth is not embedded in the map files. While it would be nice to get the projections working, it may be more reasonable to simply remove this feature and look into a more solid implementation down the road.

Sorry... didn't mean to close this issue.

[rbeiko]

This generally seems to not be working. I just tried a Mercator projection with a world map and a funny thing happened.

When the map loaded, it was squashed horizontally but the coordinates were OK.

When I set the vertical exaggeration to 50 (for fun), the positions of the continents changed. It looked more like a Mercator projection but the coordinates were not correct.

If this suggests anything, it might be worth poking it for a day or two. If not, we should either disable the feature or warn the user. Somayyeh has a couple of datasets that work that she will share.

[rbeiko]

Let's take a day or two to poke at this problem before the 2.2 release. We can present a cleaner range of options, either by fixing the projections or disabling them for now.