Nathan Brixius

Installing TopoJSON and GDAL on Windows

2015-08-09

Here are instructions for installing topojson and GDAL binaries for Windows 8. These tools are helpful if you want to mess around with map visualizations in d3.js. Parts of these instructions are taken from this helpful stackoverflow thread.

  1. Install GDAL and MapServer binaries from this location at gisinternals.com. This was the latest stable version as of 8/8/2015.
  2. On my machine, gdal was installed to <location of unzipped archive>\bin\gdal\apps. The batch file in the root of the install should set paths correctly.
  3. Install nodejs from nodejs.org.
  4. Install npm using the directions on npmjs.org.
  5. From the command prompt run npm install –g topojson
  6. On my machine, this installed topojson to C:\Users\Nathan\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules\topojson\bin

Interesting shapefile data can be found at naturalearthdata.com, as explained in this excellent tutorial.