A Simple Grid‐Maps Pipeline: Restructured, Accelerated and Upgraded

Grid maps – spatially arranged small multiples – are a powerful tool to show complex geospatial data. Meulemans et al. (2020) introduced a pipeline for computing high‐quality grid maps that are shaped roughly according to their containing geographic outlines. We present a restructured pipeline, along with various efficiency and quality improvements to each of its steps. These changes reduce the running time from minutes to seconds, while improving the resulting grid map. Our changes include speeding up the mosaic‐cartograms algorithm by Cano et al. (2015) and generalizing it to general periodic tilings.