What's new

Pie and donut symbols. The -symbols command has a new pie type. A values= list sets the size of each wedge from numbers, field names or expressions, and a fills= list sets their colors. Adding hole= makes the symbol a donut, either as a radius or, if negative, as a distance inward from the edge.

→ See -symbols and the styles and symbols guide.

Repel command. The -repel command removes or reduces overlaps between circle symbols. A max-shift= option keeps symbols within a given distance of their true positions. A polygons= option constrains symbols to polygon boundaries.

→ See -repel.

Isobands. The -contours command has a new closed flag for creating polygon bands.

Clean command improvements.

• A new close-outer-gaps option closes cracks that open onto the outside of a polygon mosaic.
• The gap-width= option is now the preferred way to set the threshold for filling gaps. Gap artifacts tend to be long and thin slivers, so a width parameter is more suitable than the now-deprecated gap-fill-area= and sliver-control= options.

Snip tool. The web UI has a snip mode for cutting polyline features apart. Hover over a line to see its vertices, then click a vertex or a point along a segment to divide it in two. The shorter piece becomes a new feature, so on a multipart feature the rest stays connected. Rings take two clicks, since one cut leaves them in one piece.

Saving rasters as GeoTIFF files. Raster layers can now be exported to a .tif GeoTIFF file. Files are compressed by default.

→ See File formats and -o.

Contour lines from rasters. The -contours command traces contour lines from a raster layer — typically elevation contours from a digital elevation model. Mapshaper picks a sensible spacing between lines from the data itself, or you can set your own with interval= or a list of levels=. Add + to keep the raster layer.

→ See -contours.

Blur command. The -blur command takes a radius either in pixels (-blur 5px) or as a real-world distance (-blur 500m). Slightly blurring an elevation model before running -contours is an effective way to get smoother, more generalized contour lines.

→ See -blur.

Interrupted and polyhedral world projections. The -proj command supports Interrupted Goode Homolosine (igh, igh_o), Interrupted Mollweide (imoll, imoll_o), Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion map (dymaxion, dymaxion2), two octahedral butterfly maps (butterfly, butterfly2), the Cahill-Keyes projection (cahill_keyes), Hajime Narukawa's 2022 update to the AuthaGraph projection (narukawa2022), and two rectangular world maps using tetrahedral geometry (markley, calm). The -graticule command can generate graticules, polygon footprints and neatlines for all of these projections.

→ See Interrupted and polyhedral world projections.

Ruler tool. The web UI has a ruler mode for measuring distances on the map. It supports great-circle measurements, projected distance readouts, basemap view, and draggable ruler endpoints.

Smooth command. The -smooth command smooths the geometry of polygon and polyline features to a given resolution.

• Sharp corners where straight-line segments meet are preserved by default instead of being rounded.
• By default, a pre-filter is applied to remove intricate sub-scale detail (jetties, narrow inlets, spikes).
• The gain option controls the amplitude of output curves.
• The max-bend-angle option trades output vertex count against join smoothness.

→ See -smooth.

Buffer command. The -buffer command makes buffers around points, lines and polygons.

• The command uses geodesic distance on lat-long datasets and on projected datasets with the geodesic option.
• Negative radius parameters shrink polygons (positive distances expand them).
• The topological option prevents buffers from overlapping nearby polygons.
• The fill-gaps option fills enclosed holes and narrow-mouthed inlets (like a river up to its mouth) without growing the outer boundary.

→ See -buffer.

Raster layer support. Mapshaper can now import GeoTIFF rasters, plus PNG and JPEG images with world-file georeferencing, preview them in the web UI, clip them with the rectangle tool, and export as images embedded in SVG. Mapshaper's default options for raster importing and projecting rasters should work well for typical image layers. When importing rasters containing data, you may need to set additional options, which are documented in the command reference.

→ See -i.

Point icons with -style. The -style command has new icon=, icon-size= and icon-color= options for drawing simple point icons, including circles, squares, rings and stars. Icons can be combined with labels on the same point layer.

→ See -style.

Undo/redo for web UI commands. The web UI can now save temporary restore data while you work, so console commands and other data edits can be undone and redone from a pop-up toolbar. This feature is very new and may have bugs, please report any problems that you encounter. Undo is on by default and can be turned off from the new History menu.

More grid options. The -grid command can now create rhombus and triangle grids. There are new cols=, rows= and cells= options for controlling the size of the grid cells, as alternatives to the original interval= option. A new cell-scale= option lets you scale each cell within the grid (creating gaps or overlaps between adjacent cells).

→ See -grid.

GeoParquet support. Mapshaper reads and writes GeoParquet (.parquet) files. To use ZSTD compression (instead of the default Snappy compression), add compression=zstd to the output options.

→ See GeoParquet.

Messages panel. Warnings and informational messages are now collected in a messages panel. When new messages are available, an icon with a count appears in the header bar; clicking it opens the panel. This keeps important information accessible without interrupting your session with a modal popup.

Command files. A sequence of Mapshaper commands can be written to a .txt file with # comments and no shell quoting, and run with -run <file> (or just mapshaper commands.txt). Command files can also be written in a shell-compatible way, if you want to be able to paste the commands into the terminal or add them to a shell script. Update: these files can also be imported and run in the browser UI.

mapshaper build.txt

→ See Command files in the reference.

Variable interpolation in commands. Command files and command lines support {{VAR}} placeholders, resolved at run time against environment variables ({{env.HOME}}), values set with the new -vars and -defaults commands, and variables defined dynamically by -calc, -define and -each expressions.

mapshaper -vars YEAR=2030 PCT=5 -run build.txt

→ See Variable interpolation, -vars and -defaults.

Farewell to dissolve2. The -dissolve command now uses Mapshaper's most robust dissolve function, which can handle overlaps, gaps and other topology errors. The legacy faster algorithm is still available as -dissolve no-repair. (The old -dissolve2 is now just an alias for -dissolve.)

→ See -dissolve.

FlatGeobuf and GeoPackage support. Mapshaper reads and writes FlatGeobuf (.fgb) and GeoPackage (.gpkg) files.

→ See FlatGeobuf, GeoPackage and -i layers=.

SVG import. SVG files exported by Mapshaper can be re-imported — useful for making stylistic edits.

→ See SVG.