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

Choosing Canvas or SVG

You have already seen some benefits and some challenges to overcome when working with either of the two rendering methods. This section is supposed to summarize the most important differences. As such, it should give you a good understanding of what to use in which circumstance. Note, that I am juxtaposing SVG and Canvas rather than HTML and SVG with Canvas. It seems appropriate to focus on SVG as it is D3's main building block due to its visualization advantages. However, the same logic applies to the equally retained HTML.

Reasons to choose SVG

Let's first look at the SVG benefits:

  • SVG is a vector-based graphics system. It allows resolution independent drawings you can scale without affecting...