hierocles / housemapper-cli

A command-line interface that exports maps of House of Representative votes by bill number

housemapper-cli

Generating House of Representatives vote maps from the command line

Housemapper is a command line tool for generating beautiful maps of House of Representatives votes from the GovTrack public API. It's powered by Node.js and D3.js.

Installation

In order to use housemapper anywhere in the command line, you must install it globally with npm:

npm install -g housemapper

Usage

Usage: housemapper -c [num] -b [num]

Options:
  -c       Congress number                                            [required]
  -b       House bill number                                          [required]
  -f       Custom file name ending in .svg (default: output.svg), either exact
           path or in current directory
  -w       Custom canvas width in pixels (default: 960)
  -h       Custom canvas height in pixels (default: 500)
  -s       Custom CSS stylesheet
  --force  Force use of specific Congress topojson file
  --help   Show help

Examples:
  housemapper -c 114 -b 4038 -f map.svg  Generate a map of votes on H.R. 4038
                                         and save to map.svg in current working directory

Custom styling

The default stylesheet is located at <install path>/bin/styles/default.css, and can be customized to suit your needs or used a template. You can create a new stylesheet within the bin/styles directory and push it through the command-line by using the -s option. Stylesheets in other directories are not currently supported.

Adding support for earlier Congresses

Housemapper comes shipped with support for the 112th, 113th, and 114th Congress, but the underlying structure of the code should easily allow the addition of earlier or later Congresses. If you have existing topojson data, just name the file according to the us-cong-###.json convention and place it within the bin/jsonfiles directory.

Note that your topojson file must provide ANSI geographic identification codes as in id geometry attribute using the following format: two digit state FIPS code + congressional district code (e.g. 0652, for the 52nd district of California).

See ANSI classification for more detail: http://www.census.gov/geo/reference/ansi.html

See topojson documentation for adding ANSI code as geometry id: https://github.com/mbostock/topojson/wiki/Command-Line-Reference#ids

Release History

• 0.0.1
  • Work in progress

Meta

Dylan Henrich – @dylanhenrich – [e-mail]

Distributed under the MIT license. See LICENSE for more information.