I want to publish and print a custom map of California. It’s for a very particular specialized audience. I’d like to print it on super tough paper/plastic similar to the National Geographic series of mapson national parks.
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[li]What software is necessary for designing such a map? Would Pagemaker be up for this project, or is there specialized software more suitable for this task?[/li][li]Who are the major players that sell “customizable” vector based maps that would be suitable for this purpose?[/li][li]What are the typical licensing costs for a small run (say 1000) maps?[/li][li]What is that super tough material they use for these maps?[/li][/ol]
Pagemaker? Really? That software is a million years old.
You probably want to use either an illustration app like Adobe Illustrator (used to make a lot of maps), or a dedicated CAD program (more precise, but less artistic).
Well, that’s why I’m asking. I’m moderately competent in in Illustrator, so that would be my first choice. I’m probably going to buy a copy of Illustrator CS6 as I’m upgrading my desktop to a 64 bit machine using Win 8. I want a standalone version as I’m not really digging Adobe’s cloud licensing and online versions. I was thinking that a page layout program would be a lot better for text flow as this particular project would have a decent amount of explanatory text. I’ve been out of the loop for graphics applications forever. Do they not make Pagemaker anymore?
I think Pagemaker was discontinued at least a decade ago. The replacement is InDesign.
When I think of a map, I think of graphics, which means Illustrator. If you get CS, then you can do the graphics in Illustrator and the layout in InDesign, but my guess is that a single-page project like a map could all be done with Illustrator.
No, PageMaker is defunct. Adobe has replaced it wth InDesign, which now has most of the market share in the publishing industry.
But the newer versions of Illustrator have excellent text handling. A skosh less refined than ID, but not so you’d notice. If you know Illustrator and don’t need multiple page documents, Illustrator will work for you.
I don’t know anything about maps, though. You might want to look into OpenStreetMap.org. It’s kind of a wiki of map data, gathered under an open license. It should give you some of the info you need to start, without as many copyright issues as you’d run into with anyone else’s maps.
Heh, I still have a copy of Pagemaker 7, Illustrator 10, and Photoshop 7 running on an XP machine. Still works for the limited graphics I do (typically silkscreening t-shirts). I’m building a balls out desktop machine with an SSD and all that neat stuff, and I have a 17 inch 64 bit notebook, so I need to upgrade to 64 bit apps anyhow.
Thanks for that OpenStreetMap.org suggestion. That’s pretty cool, but it looks like it might be a lot of work trying to optimize the resolution for a printed map. In a perfect world, I’d take the vector graphics version of a AAA map of California and go from there.
What do you want to do with the map? IANA cartographer but I have made a few maps for fun…
Open-source GIS (geographic information systems; think Google Earth combined with Illustrator and Excel) like QGis might be a starting point instead of Illustrator. Government agencies (national and state) produce a LOT of geographic data for free – roads, state boundaries, waterways, cities, counties, blah blah blah and you can mix and match those layers into a vector file. If you’d like, they can also come with human-readable feature names (for rivers, streets, townships, whatever). And you can shade terrain or features or zones according to some arbitrary criteria. You can make a pretty complete map of California pretty much for free with that tool and government data.
Then you can tinker with the output in Illustrator (PS: Consider paying for a monthly Creative Cloud membership instead of buying CS6 versions; that gets you the whole Adobe suite).
For something more artistic, you could also look into fantasy cartography software (really meant for D&D maps and the like, but you can use it to draw over your QGis output)
There are a LOT of free mapping resources available from the USGS. I don’t know about re-distribution and licensing, though.
Many years ago, I got US mapping data from the USGS on a CD, and wrote software to convert their format into something useful - an extremely high-resolution map of all the counties in the US. We used the 5 Million vector file to demonstrate how fast our rasterization software was.
USGS data, as a work of the federal government, is public domain. Once the websites recover from the shutdown, you can download it all to your heart’s content and use it as you please.
I’m an idiot when it comes to open source GUIs. I’ve been fucking around with GIMP and I feel like a retard. I’m thinking of just buying Adobe Creative Suite CS6 as it’s got everything I need and doesn’t require a subscription. Granted, the payback period will be something like 4 years, but I’m already running 13 year old software, so I figure if I’m still satisfied with it in 5 years, I’m ahead of the game. The CS6 suite is less than twice the price of Illustrator on eBay, so it’s looking pretty appealing right now.
The point of GIS software isn’t to replace Illustrator, it’s to massage geographic data into a picture (vector or raster) that you THEN use Illustrator to beautify.
It basically gives you a customizable base layer that you would then add other things on top of. You can say that you want a map of California with major cities, county boundaries, no rivers, with a terrain overlay, etc.
Even if you bought Illustrator you would still need to get all those layers somehow, and open-source GIS just gives you a way to make your own. You can, of course, choose to buy someone else’s work.
More GIS folks use their software than anyone else. There are free map services available. In any case, spend an hour or two checking out their site. I suspect you will learn a lot.
ESRI has some neat free mapping services on their website, but (at the risk of venturing into IMHO or Pit territory… )
their primary product (ArcGIS) is a slow, buggy, bloated, cobbled-together piece of shite that costs a half year’s salary. It’s the industry standard and probably also overkill for this project.
well, that is a bit harsh…
I agree with you though.
The only way to make a map is with ArcGIS. As has been stated, there are free ways to do this. When I say only, what I mean is that ESRI software is used by virtually all cartographers and is the only way to handle, with any general assurance, the many issues of putting a curved surface on a flat piece of paper. Unless all you want to do is paste symbols on an existing map, the free route to ArcGIS is the way to go. There are just too many issues only a few people understand that must be addressed in making a map.
There are GIS companies that can do this for you. Now that may cut into your profits, but to get a good product, you should consider it.
Two guys that I used to work with created their own company about 5 years ago. A women that I work with also part times for them. I’ve been in GIS for 25 years. It used to be called AM/FM - Automated Mapping and Facilities Management. (we had AM/FM awards, confusing to a 3rd shift digitizer. I wondered why we where in the radio business )
I don’t want to put their info here. PM me if you would like.
Thanks for all the info. I’ll take a look at the open source GIS stuff.
I’m unclear on the “free” route to ArcGIS. Do you mean ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap?
In any case, all I’m really looking to do is paste symbols on an existing map, with inlays of specific cities that have a preponderance of these locations.
I’m a professional cartographer, so I do this sort of project every day. In fact, a map of California social service agency locations, with Bay Area and Southland insets, is on the board for this week.
It sounds like you just want to put some symbols on top of an existing map of California, at a scale convenient to print on a letter-size page. Right?
If so, it’s easy to buy a good looking clip-art map of California from maps.com or some other sources that are not too difficult to discover (or for that matter, from me). But what kind of detail do you want? Counties and their names? Names of prominent cities? Interstate highways? Shaded relief of the mountain ranges? If you don’t need to worry about potential copyright issues, you can also just search the web for a PDF you like.
Once you have a clip art map, you can just drop the symbols on top using Illustrator or even PageMaker or InDesign, and go to print.
The next level up is to start with geographic data and make your own map, which is what some of the earlier posters have described (GIS). That involves a bit of a learning curve. You start with shapefiles from USGS National Map, from ESRI Data, from Natural Earth Vector (highly recommended), from Cal-Atlas, or from one of the sources that package Open Street Map data. Using GIS software such as ArcGIS or open-source alternative QGIS, you then choose a projection and scale, maybe select and label features based on their attributes, and finally export the map as an Illustrator file. (The online service IndieMapper also offers a way to simply turn shapefiles into Illustrator files, but doesn’t give you the labels or other niceties.) Some people like to do a lot of the work before exporting, and some of us prefer to do most of the work (of choosing colors and line weights) in Illustrator.
For more specialized help, feel free to visit the mapmaker’s forum cartotalk.com.
That’s correct, as that would be the simplest solution.
I’m looking at a detail level similar to the AAA map of California. All highways and major county roads, and names of almost all cities. I’ll PM you to ask you about your fees, although this is a fly-by-night venture and I doubt that it will be hugely profitable, so I’m unwilling to invest a ton of money in it.
Not sure if this is still in effect, but Adobe offers a free D/L of the entire Creative Suite (version 2) Works fine for most purposes. Seach their website.
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