kaidad / us-atlas

Roll your own TopoJSON from the National Atlas and U.S. Census Bureau.

U.S. Atlas TopoJSON

This repository provides a convenient mechanism for generating TopoJSON files from the National Atlas one million-scale dataset and U.S. Census Bureau shapefiles.

Visual Index

airports	amtrak	coast	congress
counties	ferries	nation	ports
railroads	roads	states	streams
waterbodies	zipcodes

Installing via Homebrew

Before you can run make, you’ll need to install Node.js. Here’s how to do that using Homebrew on Mac OS X:

brew install node

And then, clone this repository, install its dependencies and run make:

git clone https://github.com/mbostock/us-atlas.git
cd us-atlas
npm install
make

If you want to install this software using an alternate method see the website for TopoJSON. I also recommend reading my tutorial, Let’s Make a Map.

Generating TopoJSON

Once you have everything installed, simply run:

make

This will generate a large number of TopoJSON files of varying size in the topo directory. As a by-product of producing these files, you’ll also download shapefiles directly from the National Atlas or the Census Bureau.

make and make all generate TopoJSON files for the boundaries of the United States. In addition, you can run make topo/us-streams.json and make topo/us-roads.json to generate TopoJSON for streams and roads. These aren't made by default because of their size. us-streams.json requires a 180M download and 4.5GB of memory to generate.

If you want to generate a custom map, I recommend modifying the Makefile. Or, just use the Makefile as a set of examples, and run the appropriate ogr2ogr and topojson commands from the terminal.