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[Gidde]

Huh. And I had thought that the Gall-Peters was just as reviled for distortion as the Mercator. I'll probably pick up the book on principle though. Thanks for posting

[Hai-Etlik]

Huh. And I had thought that the Gall-Peters was just as reviled for distortion as the Mercator. I'll probably pick up the book on principle though. Thanks for posting

Mercator is a perfectly reasonable projection for accomplishing its particular goals. The only problem with it was that it was used by people who are not trained cartographers/geographers in situations to which is wasn't as well suited. Gall-Peters on the other hand is reviled by cartographers. It's far inferior to non-cylindrical projections as an equal area representation of a full globe, and far inferior to hybrid projections as a full globe projection for general reference maps.

Peters was not a Cartographer, Geographer, Mathemetician, or Geodeticist, he was a Cinematographer. He figured out enough to come up with a bland and unimaginative projection (Simply a configuration of Cylindrical Equal Area) that Gall had come up with a century earlier. He just got more traction with the public than anyone who had pulled this sort of thing before. He made ridiculous claims about the projection, and about the harm of using non-equal area maps. (Does anyone really think Greenland is as important as Africa simply because they look the same size in Mercator?)

If a real cartographer is making a global map, they will generally use something like Mollweide or Hammer if they really need it to be equal area, like for maps involving population densities. If it's a general map, they will use a hybrid projection like Robinson or Winkel Tripel. And if they need some specialized property like Conformality, they'll use an appropriate projection like Stereographic or Mercator.