[Proj] Libproj4 manual opinion poll

Greg Troxel gdt at ir.bbn.com
Sun Sep 28 20:58:28 EDT 2008


  The libproj4 manual is becoming a big beast and often taking too long
  for upgrades.  While browsing around the web looking at various
  "repositories" of cartographic projection information one aspect came
  to mind: in many cases referring to a particular projection brought up
  a single page containing only info related to the selected projection.
  For example: Anderson's projection plots on
  http://www.csiss.org/map-projections/ is an example of selecting a
  category->projection_name gives a pdf picture of that projection.  But
  one trouble with this particular site is there is no (or very little)
  supplementary information.

  I am suggesting that the current manual be changed to operate in a
  manner similar to Anderson's except that in addition to a sample
  illustration (reduced to reasonable screen size) there would be a
  description of libproj4 control options, formula and any comments
  pertinent and unique to that projection.

I am not quite sure exactly what you are proposing.  My opinion, not
well considered, is that the proper role of the libproj4 manual is not
to be a tutorial in projections, but to clearly explain to a user who
*understand the projection* how they should encode parameters for use.
So particular if there are more tutorial documents available online, it
might do to take a restricted position and refer to parameters by names
matching those descriptions, along with links to them.  For example, it
would be fair to refer to USGS PP 1395, and expect people to read that
and explain how "k_0" in proj relates to some constant of a similar name
in Snyder's description.
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