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.

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, from this repository’s root directory, install the dependencies:

npm install

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.