isabella232 / world-atlas

Roll your own TopoJSON from Natural Earth data.

World Atlas TopoJSON

This repository provides a convenient mechanism for generating TopoJSON files from Natural Earth.

Installing via Homebrew

Before you can run make, you’ll need to install Node.js and ogr2ogr. Here’s how to do that using Homebrew on Mac OS X:

brew install node gdal

And then, from this repository’s root directory, install the dependencies:

npm install

If the installation of node-canvas fails for you, try

PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/X11/lib/pkgconfig npm install canvas

Or, add this to your ~/.bash_profile:

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/opt/X11/lib/pkgconfig"

If you want to install this software using an alternate method see the website for TopoJSON. I also recommend reading my tutorial, Let’s Make a Map.

Generating TopoJSON

Once you have everything installed, simply run:

make

This will generate various TopoJSON files in the topo directory. As a by-product of producing these files, you’ll also download the shapefiles directly from Natural Earth and convert them into GeoJSON and filter.

If you want to generate a custom map, I recommend modifying the Makefile. Or, just use the Makefile as a set of examples, and run the appropriate ogr2ogr and topojson commands from the terminal.