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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2019 Oct 4, 17:59 -0700
David, you wrote:
"So NZ switched to an old mapping standard?"
Sounds like it. Stop for a minute and consider: why does New Zealand need its own mapping projection? Similarly, we can ask why the Ordnance Survey in the UK needs a special mapping projection. The answer in the latter case is relatively simple: legacy users. As I noted earlier, the OS is an institution, and they have deeply conservative fans who hate the idea that maps are all digitized now. Clinging to the map projection is a way of ensuring that the maps remain printed products, first and foremost, in some small sense. Without printing as an archival function, there is no significant need for a particular mapping projection. An official national mapping projection is an anachronism (apologies to Queen Boudica of the Iceni for calling her an anachronism).
Frank Reed
