What's new

Raster layer support. Mapshaper can now import GeoTIFF rasters, plus PNG and JPEG images with world-file georeferencing. You can reproject, clip, and export rasters as images embedded in SVG files. Mapshaper's default options 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. Turn on undo 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. In a future release, these files will also be runnable in the browser.

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 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.