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Asked: 2026-05-30T17:37:56+00:00

I have an exercise in problem solving for those who like that kind of

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I have an exercise in problem solving for those who like that kind of thing. I’m working on a mapping application that uses Google Maps. A user first enters a series of coordinates and a “radius”. The user then requests either a line or an area be plotted. The plots are taking place on Google Maps using polygons. In other words, given the blue line (or area) defined by the blue points and a distance, calculate the red points and draw the red polygon where the edges are of the given distance away from the user-provided edges:

line

area

I have managed to get this to work in “most” situations by calculate forward and reverse bearings, then finding the points with a bearing 90 degrees off these in the appropriate direction. For the arcs I just calculated the location points along that arc at 5 degree intervals. In the case of the inside of an acute angle, I determine where the two lines intersect and use that point, but this fails miserably sometimes when the cross-track distance at that point is greater than the radius that was provided.

I’m hoping someone knows of an easier way? Maybe one that works all the time regardless of the ratio of the cross-track to radius distances? Or maybe a library already exists to do this?

I hope what I’m trying to do makes sense… It’s hard to put in words. Maybe if I had the words a search would have been helpful even.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Well, the answer turned out to be simpler than I thought. It took me back to a lesson I was taught during CompSci 101 almost 15 years ago:

    “Use existing libraries whenever possible.”

    Once I found out (via googling), that what I’m looking for isn’t called an “offset” or a “scale” but is actually called a “buffer” in GIS computing, it was simple. There are some great libraries like Clipper by Angus Johnson that can do it, but I wanted something JavaScript specific.

    That brought me to arcGIS‘s GeometryService. They even have a Google Maps version but it’s only API v2. Luckily, there’s an official, unsupported version I found via the arcGIS forums that works with GMaps API v3.

    So, my solution was to use that, called arcgislink, and it’s buffer function works perfectly with Google Maps LatLng points, Google Maps Polygons/Polylines, and any of the standard arcGIS types. Anyone else needing to do this with Google Maps, I highly recommend looking at their libraries.

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