Grid2Poster

Generate print-ready posters of electrical grid infrastructure from OpenStreetMap data.
Transmission lines for a country or continent are downloaded and rendered with GeoPandas, OSMnx, and Matplotlib. The project is heavily inspired and reused styling from maptoposter.

Grid2Poster supports countries, states, provinces and continents, as well as predefined regions.

Data

Grid2Poster uses OpenStreetMap features tagged as:

• power=line
• power=minor_line when enabled
• power=cable when enabled

Feature completeness depends on OpenStreetMap coverage in the selected country or region.

Contributing to the data

Coverage and quality in your country can be improved by mapping transmission infrastructure directly in OpenStreetMap. MapYourGrid is a community initiative that coordinates this work. It provides tutorials, country-level completeness/quality statistics and mapping tools for tracing power lines, generators and substations from imagery.

Installation

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

By default every run writes both a PNG and an SVG:

python create_grid_poster.py --country Portugal

For large countries, reduce the Overpass query tile size:

python create_grid_poster.py --country Vietnam --tile-size-km 150

Include distribution grids if available. Coverage various significatly across the globe:

python create_grid_poster.py --country Germany --include-minor-lines

List available themes. Create a new theme JSON file in the 'themes' directory to find your own style.

python create_grid_poster.py --list-themes

Use a local GeoJSON file as the boundary instead of geocoding (handy for custom regions or sub-national areas). All polygonal features in the file are dissolved into a single boundary. The --country value is still used for the poster title and output filename. --landscape will render in landscape (horizontal) orientation.

python create_grid_poster.py --country "Middle East and North Africa" --boundary-geojson ./regions/mena.geojson --landscape --theme neon_cyberpunk 

Render an entire continent. Continent boundaries come from the Natural Earth admin-0 dataset (downloaded and cached on first use) because Nominatim does not resolve continent names. Accepted values are Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceania, and South America. The aggregate name Global combines every inhabited continent.

python create_grid_poster.py --country Africa --tile-size-km 500

Continent-scale runs hit the Overpass API hundreds of times and can take several hours. A larger --tile-size-km cuts the number of queries; pick a value that still stays under the Overpass per-query size limit.

Options

Output

Generated posters are written to the posters/ directory by default. Intermediate OSM responses and processed geometries are cached in cache/ to avoid repeated downloads.

Gallery

Poster	Country	Theme
	China	paper_grid
	South America	japanese_ink
	India	japanese_ink
	Pakistan	electric_midnight
	Vietnam	midnight_blue
	California	warm_beige
	Mexico	forest
	Italy	autumn
	Zambia	sunset
	Morocco	autumn
	Latin America	emerald

Predefined regions

The regions/ directory ships with multi-country boundaries that map to common power-system groupings. Pass any of them via --boundary-geojson and set --country to the title you want printed on the poster:

python create_grid_poster.py --country "Continental Europe" --boundary-geojson ./regions/continental_europe.geojson --tile-size-km 300

For ad-hoc areas (a single state, a metro region, a custom polygon), supply your own GeoJSON via --boundary-geojson. All polygonal features in the file are dissolved into one boundary.

Attribution

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors.