Thoughts - What I Do at 2:00 AM? Make a Map, Of Course!
Pacific Ocean B/W Map (1-cm:500-km)
As I tell my students, "Mr Minton is frugal." It's not that I'm cheap, but if I spend my hard-earned cash on something I can get for free, that's just silly. Take, for example, this seemingly innocent looking Pacific Ocean B/W Map, a tool used by geography teachers throughout the world. It was created per a reader's request. He asked if I could make the above map. "Of course", I said. Thinking to myself, "I have every kind of world shoreline vector map file available. A Pacific centered map should be easy to make. Aaha! Not so easy.
First you need to have a mapping package that delivers a Pacific centered map. Marplot, my free mapping package, provides a Greenwich centered map. How does one get a Pacific centered map from a Greenwich centered map. Because we all know that the outer edge of the Greenwich centered map should be the middle of a Pacific centered map.
I solved it and the finished product turned out pretty good. Any guesses as to how I created my map? It has to do with cut and paste, image resizing and careful alignment of two cuts.
It isn't that big of a deal. I used ImageForge software to manipulate my Eastern Pacific and Western Pacific images, which I had taken from Marplot. I pasted and aligned the two images and stitched them together. I saved the Pacific Ocean image as a JPEG file. Just for fun, I imported the image into MS Word and created the Pacific Ocean B/W map as a .doc file. Both the Pacific Ocean JPEG and the Pacific Ocean DOC files are available for download. And that's how I did it. Pretty cool, huh?
Enjoy!
Labels: B/W map, map, Marplot, Pacific Ocean
