Mercator Template - Measuring Distance

Goncharov

Thank you again for the response!

I am now transitioning to working with the Mercator template. I transferred my old "flat" map and now am trying to find out how to measure distances in a circular map. Meaning, the distance measure tool is only measuring in a straight line. Is there any way to find out accurately how far my continent is from the North Pole, for example? In the old flat map it was, say, 4,000 km. Now, I plunked it in the right spot vis-a-vis the Equator but the distance from the Pole is not different - something like 5300 km. I guess my question is how can I make sure that my land area (an alternative-geography Europe) is at the right latitude?

Goncharov

I guess ultimately I am trying to find out which template-style is the most "area-preserving", or the least distorting one? I just found out that the Mercator projection really distorts the polar areas. Thank you again!

Monsen

Projections will always distort the map in some way because there is no way one can transfer a map of a sphere to a plane. I like the Mercator projection myself for world maps, but unfortunately, it is hopeless when it comes to dealing with polar regions. If you have the Tome of Ultimate Mapping (v3), there is a list of various projections in the Fractal Terrains section of the book. There is also a lot of information about the topic in the wikipedia article about Map Projections.

Note that CC3 is completely unaware of the concept of projections, it simply maps to a plane, and does not care about what you are really trying to illustrate. So when it comes to projections, you will need to handle that manually in CC3. As you have already discovered, the distance tool can't handle this either, it only measures straight lines. You will need to to the necessary calculations yourself to get the distances right.

Goncharov

Thank you for clarifying this!