Book Image

Learning D3.js 5 Mapping - Second Edition

By : Thomas Newton, Oscar Villarreal, Lars Verspohl
Book Image

Learning D3.js 5 Mapping - Second Edition

By: Thomas Newton, Oscar Villarreal, Lars Verspohl

Overview of this book

D3.js is a visualization library used for the creation and control of dynamic and interactive graphical forms. It is a library used to manipulate HTML and SVG documents as well as the Canvas element based on data. Using D3.js, developers can create interactive maps for the web, that look and feel beautiful. This book will show you how build and design maps with D3.js and gives you great insight into projections, colors, and the most appropriate types of map. The book begins by helping you set up all the tools necessary to build visualizations and maps. Then it covers obtaining geographic data, modifying it to your specific needs, visualizing it with augmented data using D3.js. It will further show you how to draw and map with the Canvas API and how to publish your visualization. By the end of this book, you'll be creating maps like the election maps and the kind of infographics you'll find on sites like the New York Times.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
6
Finding and Working with Geographic Data

The SVG coordinate system

What about position? Where do these primitives draw inside the SVG element? What if you wanted to put a circle in the top-left and another one bottom-right? Where do you start?

SVG is positioned by a grid system, similar to the Cartesian coordinate system. However, in SVG (0,0) is the top-left corner. The x axis proceeds horizontally from left to right starting at 0. The y axis also starts at 0 and extends downward. See the following illustration:

What about drawing shapes on top of each other? How do you control the z index? In SVG, there is no z coordinate. Depth is determined by the order in which the shape is drawn. If you were to draw a circle with coordinates (10,10) and then another one with coordinates (10,10), you would see the second circle drawn on top of the first.

The following sections will cover the basic SVG primitives for drawing shapes...