[This article was first published on modTools, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here)Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.The PROJ format for defining Coordinate Reference Systems (CRS) is becoming deprecated, as PROJ strings cannot accurately store modern datum transformations, coordinate epoch information, or complex axis order rules. However, that format is much easier and more practical for humans to type and read, and it is still often used as a legacy convenience. I, for one, use it often for centering a map projection on the mapped region, thus avoiding the distortion that occurs away from the projection center. For example, imagine I want to map New Zealand in a Lambert Azimuthal Equal-Area projection in R:library(terra)library(geodata)nz