d3-geo VS polylabel

This tutorial will show you how to convert publicly available shapefiles to TopoJSON to create interactive maps with d3/d3-geo. I will show you how to do this without the use of the command line so you can get into experimenting with d3 as fast as possible. If you are interested in working with shapefiles and TopoJSON in a more advanced fashion, I suggest you take a look at Mike Bostock’s recent multipart tutorials on command-line cartography.

geographical data handling system

For the globe spinning, I used d3 and topojson to render the world at whatever projection/rotation/etc I give it. Then, using requestAnimationFrame, every frame I slightly rotate the world. Then the "water" behind it is just a blue circle that has hidden overflow.

Using a d3-geo we make projection and a path generator to 'draw' the geographic lines

Thanks for the compliments! The territory data is coming from https://github.com/aourednik/historical-basemaps, I use this data to render an SVG map with D3.js. This is pretty powerful since you can control every part of the rendering mechanism. With D3-geo you can easily do the projections and graticule.

Further, the correct placement of country labels is complex. You would think just centering is enough but for some country shapes (like the Turkish Empire in 1914) this looks very out of place so I tried this algorithm but calculating it upfront proofed more accurate. I still had to program my own editor to correctly place some labels so that they are esthetically pleasing. (still not 100% done with it)