Drag countries anywhere to compare their true size, grade your projection's honesty, play a Mercator-lie guessing duel, find antipodes, draw great circles and measure in playful units.
Comprehensive Academic Reference Manual — complete documentation of every feature, parameter, and workflow. Hosted on GitHub Pages.
Every flat map lies — this plugin shows you how, playfully. 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 goes further: a drag-anywhere true-size comparator, a guessing game, a projection report card, Tissot circles, antipodes, great circles and measurements in Belgiums. Built for teaching projections, scale and spatial reasoning — and for having fun with the map you stare at every day.
- True Size drag — grab any country (bundled offline world layer) or any polygon from your own layers 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. Rotate with
R/E, drop as many coloured ghosts as you like, export them as a layer. - Administrative boundary vectors — choose a country and download its ADM0 country boundary from the bundled world data or ADM1 first-level units from Natural Earth's official 10m states/provinces archive.
- Size Duel — a built-in game: two countries drawn exactly the way a web-Mercator map draws them; guess which is really bigger. Score, streaks, and a per-round confession of how much the projection lied.
- Projection honesty report card — one click grades the current project CRS: separate marks for area and shape honesty (A+ to F), per-latitude inflation figures and a plain-language verdict.
- Tissot indicatrix circles — generate the classic distortion diagnostic as a styled memory layer (radius and spacing configurable): equal circles on the ground, telling shapes on the map.
- Live distortion HUD — a small readout pinned to the canvas showing how stretched areas and shapes are right where you are looking, updating as you pan.
- Antipode tunnel — click anywhere to learn where you would surface if you dug straight through the Earth, with a land-or-ocean verdict (it is almost always ocean) and a fly-to button.
- Great-circle truth — the genuinely shortest path between two clicks drawn against the map's straight line, with the wasted kilometres spelled out.
- Fun units — accurate geodesic measurements first, then the fun: areas in football pitches, Central Parks and Belgiums; distances in marathons, Bosphorus bridges and fractions of the way to the Moon.
- Offline-first, dependency-free — the generalized Natural Earth country workflow, geodesy and map tools work fully offline. Optional local ADM1 vectors use Natural Earth's official public-domain archive; no external QGIS or Python dependency is required.
From the QGIS Plugin Hub (recommended): Plugins → Manage and Install Plugins… → search for "02truesize" → Install.
From a release zip: download the latest zip from Releases → Plugins → Install from ZIP.
Requires QGIS 3.28 or newer (QGIS 4 ready). No external Python dependencies.
- Click the 02truesize toolbar icon to open the dock.
- On the True Size tab, tick Show the built-in world layer, press Pick up & drag, then click Greenland.
- Move the cursor towards the equator and watch Greenland deflate; click to drop the ghost. Press
R/Ewhile carrying to rotate; right-click cancels. - Open the Size Duel tab and see how many rounds of "which is really bigger?" you survive.
- On the Distortion tab, press Grade my current projection — then switch the project CRS (e.g. EPSG:3857 vs Mollweide) and grade it again.
For online administrative data, choose a country and either ADM0 or ADM1, then press Download selected administrative boundaries. The source switches to the downloaded layer automatically. Data stays in memory unless you save it with QGIS Export > Save Features As.
Natural Earth's 14.2 MB ADM1 archive is downloaded once per open panel and reused for later country selections. A few tiny countries and territories do not have ADM1 coverage; the panel then suggests ADM0.
| Tab | Tool | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| True Size | Pick up & drag | Equal-area re-centred ghost outlines of countries, active-layer polygons or downloaded administrative units; rotation, multi-ghost, export to layer |
| True Size | Download boundaries | Offline bundled ADM0 or country-filtered Natural Earth 10m ADM1 vectors |
| Size Duel | — | Mercator-drawn silhouettes, guess the truly bigger one; score, streak and best-streak memory |
| Truth Tools | Antipode tunnel | Click → antipode marker, country-or-ocean verdict, fly-to |
| Truth Tools | Great circle vs map line | Geodesic path vs straight map line with both ground lengths and the difference |
| Truth Tools | Fun units | Distance paths and clicked polygon areas in accurate-but-playful units |
| Distortion | Report card | Area & shape honesty grades plus verdict for the current project CRS |
| Distortion | Tissot circles | Constant ground-radius circle layer (250/500/1000 km, 15/30/45° spacing) |
| Distortion | Live HUD | On-canvas areal inflation & angular deformation readout at the view centre |
02truesize is one of 17 open-source QGIS plugins by the same author:
| Planning & analysis | CAD & production | 3D & visualization |
|---|---|---|
| PlanX — spatial-planning suite | PlanX CAD Toolset — drafting-grade CAD | PlanX 3D City — Three.js city viewer |
| GeoStats Lab — spatial statistics | EasyFillet — tangent-arc fillet | 3D OSM Model — OSM → 3D city in browser |
| Suitability Lab — raster MCDA | Settlement Toolset — 9-stage settlement plans | OSM Quick 3D — OSM → native QGIS 3D |
| DataCube Lab — spatiotemporal cubes | UIP Toolset — Turkish master-plan automation | Urban Procedural 3D — parametric zoning lab |
| Urban Resilience — 28 resilience tools | ParcelFlux — parcel subdivision | CartoLab — publication cartography |
GPL-3.0 © Yusuf Eminoğlu — bug reports and feature requests welcome in Issues.
World outlines derived from QGIS's bundled Natural Earth data (public domain). Inspired by thetruesize.com. ADM1 vectors come from Natural Earth Admin 1 — States, Provinces version 5.1.1 (public domain).