02truesize - Map Truth Lab
Drag countries or downloaded ADM0/ADM1 administrative vectors anywhere to compare true size, grade projection honesty and explore geodesy.
Maps lie: every flat map must distort the globe, and the everyday web map (Mercator) inflates whatever sits far from the equator — Greenland is drawn like a continent yet Africa is about 14 times larger. 02truesize brings the much-loved thetruesize.com idea natively into QGIS and then goes further. The True Size tool lets you grab any country from the bundled offline world layer, any polygon from your own layers, or country-selected ADM0/ADM1 vectors, and drag it across the map; the outline is re-projected on the fly through an equal-area azimuthal projection centred under your cursor, so it always covers its true ground area. ADM0 comes instantly from the bundled world data; ADM1 is filtered from Natural Earth's official public-domain 10m states/provinces archive, downloaded once per panel session. Size Duel is a built-in game: two countries are drawn exactly the way a web map would draw them and you guess which one is really bigger — the plugin keeps score and confesses how much the projection lied each round. The Distortion tab grades the current project CRS with separate marks for area and shape, Tissot indicatrix circles and a live distortion readout. Truth Tools adds an antipode finder, great-circle comparison and playful measurement units. The core remains dependency-free with pure-Python geodesy and native QGIS map tools. A playful, accurate companion for teaching projections, scale and spatial reasoning. Developed with feedback from educational workflows at Dokuz Eylul University, Department of City and Regional Planning.