[Proj] Canonic North-American Projection

[Gerald Evenden]

One of the nicest for NA that I can recall is the Chamberlin Trimetric 
that
National Geographic Society uses---or, at least, once used.  The 
Oblique Bipolar
Conic does a nice job for NA and SA combined.  Realistically, oblique 
stereographic
would work.  I would not be much in favor of the conics if covering US 
& Canada in
the same map.  More important, consider if one wants equal-area as a
requirement.  For small scale maps conformality is is of little 
importance.

As a bottom line, there is no "canonical" map for NA.  People are used 
to seeing
all sorts of lousy projection choices and ignore the distortions: like 
Mercator for
just the conterminous US.

If you have any sense of artistic judgement, pick one that looks good.

On Feb 22, 2005, at 4:24 PM, Patrick Mézard wrote:

> [Sorry if this message is a dupe. First, I tried to send through the 
> gmane interface but the previous mail seemed to have disappeared in 
> limbo]
>
> Hello,
> I would like to know if there are canonical projections to display 
> maps of North America (USA + Canada). I am not looking for specific 
> properties, just to find a representation US people are accustomed to 
> (think US elections results maps for instance).
>
> I thought there would be some kind of Lambert Conic projection that 
> USGS or other official agencies would prefer among others but I cannot 
> find any sanctified datum/transformation. Web searches or quick looks 
> to MapInfo returns several proposals for secant parallels for Lambert 
> SP2 projections applied to NAD27 datums but no canonic one.
>
> What should I use ? Is there one with a registed ESPG or GeoTiff 
> identifier ?
>
> Thank you for any hint.
>
> Patrick Mézard
>
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