That is beautiful. You should sell those lampshades through a kickstarter project!
I used Geogebra to work out the standard parallels I needed to fit the shape of the lamp shade, QuantumGIS to prepare and project the data, and a custom program in Ruby to make the graticule (though QGIS could have done that as well)
And obviously I used Inkscape as I always do for the graphics.
That is beautiful. You should sell those lampshades through a kickstarter project!
QuantumGIS. Gotcha. More stuff to learn.
There are a few other desktop other GISes to try playing with: GRASS, uDig, OpenJUMP, gvSIG. GRASS probably isn't what you want, but I've heard uDig and OpenJUMP are fairly approachable. Or if you are made of money, there's ArcGIS; even the absolute bottom of the line license makes Photoshop look inexpensive.
Printing has been problematic. I've tried 6 different print shops. The first two would have done it for a reasonable price, but both of them were having problems with their wide format printers. The next two both wanted in the vicinity of 7 times what the first to would have charged, and the last two didn't have wide format printers at all.
However, I have printed it out in sections on my own printer and have glued them together to get a prototype.
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Have you tried online photography places like Shutterfly? I know they make poster sized prints, not sure if the paper they use is thin enough to let the light shine through properly though.
BOB
We do not stop playing because we grow old.
We grow old because we stop playing.
www.dragonslayers-society.org
This has turned out so well. I used to work at a family owned art store. During our free time, we'd work on projects like this (lamp-shades, hand-made sketchbooks, etc.) and the store would sell them. Can't wait to see the final product.