[mparr4]

We settled on this choice after originally using alternate projections. The source data is not in mercator, we specifically reproject to mercator.

I don't disagree with you, I personally prefer other projections for many of our maps, but after the hundredth comment saying "you got the shape of [MY STATE] wrong, you idiots!" we realized that people think of their state (and country, in the case of CONUS) in mercator, so we decided it wasn't worth fighting that fight.

For other countries, we tend to use locale specific projections.

One projection question for you, while we're chatting: do you have a favorite Asian projection? I wanted to center the projection on center mass, which would mean changing the poles, but couldn't figure that out!

[jacobolus]

> hundredth comment saying "you got the shape of [MY STATE] wrong, you idiots!"

Funny enough, when I see either the USA map or the California map in Mercator projection, the first thing that comes to mind is “wow the shape is completely wrong!” :-)

> favorite Asian projection?

Asia is huge, so you are necessarily going to get a lot of distortion of one kind or another. It’s a close-enough-to-circular blobby shape that you might be fine with some azimuthal projection. If you want to preserve local shapes but don’t mind variation in scale, you can use a stereographic projection centered roughly on the circumcenter. If you want to reduce distance errors while allowing a bit of local shape distortion, you could use an azimuthal equidistant projection.

(In either case, you could probably get away with either an assumed spherical earth, or you could properly correct for the ellipsoid. The difference between the two would not be too obvious at a glance.)

There are various other projections you could try. You might find one or another aesthetically better. For example perhaps some oblique conic projection would fit the region slightly better than the azimuthal projection. Or you could try something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamberlin_trimetric_projectio...

Here’s e.g. a nice comparison of some possible projections for Europe:

https://observablehq.com/@toja/five-map-projections-for-euro...

[mparr4]

Thanks for the link. We used Lambert Conformal Conic for Europe and Robinson for Asia, but I'm not thrilled with the Asia projection.

I really want to be able to change the latitude the projection is centered on, but haven't been able to figure out how to move that point yet, so we've got more skew near the pole than we do at the bottom of the map. Feels like it could be better.