Distortion with matlab mfwdtran map projection

General talk
1

Hi All,

I’m plotting the footprints of buildings taken from the Open Street Maps data set. I’ve converted the lat and lon coordinates to Cartesian coordinates using mfwdtran in matlab and the wgs84Ellipsoid projection. The buildings I’m plotting are in New York City so the UTM zone is set to 18T.

The building footprint is more distorted than I would like it to be. I assume the distortion is due to the large size of the UTM zone definition? Is there a way to refine the location of the map projection to reduce distortion?

Or is there some other cause of the distortion?

Here is an example of the distorted building footprint. Note that the corners are not right angles:

2

:lol:
Matlab doesn’t force figure axes to be of equal scale.

You should use:

axis equal

when drawing your figure.

Reference: https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/axis.html

3

ouch - that was embarrassing!

Thanks!