I've often thought about doing something like this for documenting my bike trips; a 'somewhat straightened' map would work great down the side of the page with

I've often thought about doing something like this for documenting my bike trips; a 'somewhat straightened' map would work great down the side of the page with the story. The straight line route maps that used to appear in AA map books are a bit dull, I wanted something more like http://w.faringdon.org/alljpg/hy%20Map%20London%20to%20St%20Davidsjpg.JPG http://w.faringdon.org/alljpg/hy%20Map%20London%20to%20St%20... However I got sidetracked in the notion of how to linearize the map. What I want, is roughly: start with the route, smooth it so that the original route still wiggles on the final map (eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramer%E2%80%93Douglas%E2%80%93Peucker_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramer%E2%80%93Douglas%E2%80%93..., then interpolate with splines) Simply using straight line distance to the curve won't work, places can be the same distance from multiple points on the route (unless you divide space up as in the article). So what I thought of instead was, treat the smoothed line as a charged wire, and map POIs as opposite charges. Electric field lines do not intersect, and if a POI 'charge' is allowed to fall towards the 'wire', the distance it travels and the place it lands give me coordinates. These calculations are relatively straightforward (see eg http://lampx.tugraz.at/~hadley/physikm/apps/linecharge.php http://lampx.tugraz.at/~hadley/physikm/apps/linecharge.php), and I never need to figure out a closed form for the transformation, which I guess would be horrendous. I'm not sure what you'd call this coordinate system; it bears some similarity with isobaric coordinate systems in meteorology though. Edited to add: these things are called 'strip maps' in the literature btw, there's a survey of examples here: http://www.geovista.psu.edu/publications/MacEachren/MacEachren_ALinearView_86.pdf http://www.geovista.psu.edu/publications/MacEachren/MacEachr...