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MAPublisher 10 Released

We’re excited to announce that we’ve released MAPublisher 10 for Adobe Illustrator. The MAPublisher product team has been working closely with our customers to build more useful features, tools, and to improve the look and feel.

MAPublisher 10

This update contains new features and performance improvements as well as fixes for reported bugs. Some highlights are mentioned below, for the full release notes see below.

Adobe Illustrator Creative Cloud 2018 support. We are fully committed to providing the best map design tools seamlessly built into Adobe Illustrator. We have improved our user interface (panels, tools, buttons) to support high-resolution monitors. This release is fully compatible with the latest Adobe Illustrator CC 2018 on both Windows (32-bit and 64-bit) and Mac.

Manage Data Links. This feature has long been requested by our customers. You now have the ability to create and manage data links for MAPublisher documents. MAP layers in a document can be updated when its source data has been modified. Data links are checked automatically every time a document is opened and will display the status of affected layers in the MAP Views panel. This allows you to keep track of data that may have been moved or modified. When a data source is missing, a notification will alert you in both the Edit Data Link dialog box and MAP View panel. Note that only the link is dynamic and not the actual map features, meaning that manipulating your features in the document does not directly affect the source data. You will need to export your data if you want to overwrite your source data.

Filter attributes and filter geometry on import. A common workflow our customers encounter is trying to reduce the amount of data being imported. Often times, a dataset covers a much larger area or has too many attributes included. There is now a way to streamline import so that it’s not only quicker to import, but also results in improved Adobe Illustrator performance due to the reduction in the number of map features on the artboard. The new attribute filter helps you  select which layer attributes (or layers) to include or not include prior to import. The new geometry filter provides several options (including an interactive map) to help you select which area to include or not include prior to import.

Redesigned Scale Bar tool. We’ve worked a lot with our customers to redesign the scale bar tool. In addition to new customization options, new scale bar styles were generated with the help of the US National Park Service, Harpers Ferry Center. You also now have the ability to save, import, and export scale bar styles, making it easier to share defined styles with others.

Improved MAP Tagger Tool. You now have the ability to create custom leader lines with various arrow styles and option to snap leader line to different positions around a label. This provides a new level of customization and efficiency without having to style leader lines afterwards.

New Simplify Art simplification method. A new Visvalingam-Whyatt simplification method and fault tolerance setting to accommodate positional error between shared edges in the topology. The Visvalingam-Whyatt method is an area based algorithm which eliminates points based on their effective area. By iterating through points of lines and areas, it calculates and removes the point with the least effective area.

 

MAPublisher 10 Release Notes

  • Fully compatible with the latest Adobe Illustrator CC 2018 on both Windows (32-bit and 64-bit) and Mac
  • New ability to create and manage data links for MAPublisher documents. MAP layers in a document can be updated when its source data has been modified.
  • New attribute filter capability to select which layers and attributes to include or exclude prior to import
  • New geometry filter capability to select which features to include or exclude prior to import
  • New scale bar styles and customization options including ability to save, import, and export scale bar styles
  • New Visvalingam-Whyatt simplification method and fault tolerance settings to simplify art
  • New MAP Tagger Tool ability to create custom leader lines with various arrow styles and an option to snap leader line to different positions around a label
  • A new Point Utilities action that can rotate points to the angle of latitude
  • A modified Text Utilities action that can draw a point for text based upon text alignment for indexing purposes
  • New settings for North Arrow location including True North and a custom coordinate and options to use Great Circle or compass method
  • New MAP Web Author HTML5 export customization options including adjustable scale bar
  • A number of user interface and usability enhancements.

 

The Best of Both Worlds – Map-making and GIS Functionalities in Adobe Illustrator

Original article from Directions Magazine on October 4, 2017.


Modern cartography—the art, science, and technology of making maps—consists of manipulating and displaying geographic elements in a graphic environment. Traditionally, GIS software has offered users limited ability to manipulate the graphic attributes (hue, brightness, saturation, transparency, line thickness, text, etc.) of geographic elements, while graphic design software has treated geographic features as it would any other graphic elements, without regard for how they are connected in predictable ways to other geographic elements and to Earth itself. Additionally, in the real world, natural or artificial boundaries and features are constantly changing and cartographers need to update maps at different scales and in different styles to reflect these changes. Therefore, cartographers need an efficient and reliable way to bridge the divide between GIS and graphic design software.

First launched 30 years ago, Adobe Illustrator has long been the professional standard for graphic design, especially for creating vector graphics. For more than 20 years, Avenza’s MAPublisher has provided extensive GIS functionality inside Adobe Illustrator. I discussed the synergy between these two programs with two experts:

  • David Lambert, Director of Cartographic Production for National Geographic’s commercial retail mapping products, which includes its well known Trails Illustrated outdoor recreation map series, and
  • Tom Patterson, Senior Cartographer at the National Park Service’s Harpers Ferry Center, in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, which designs most of the interpretive media that is found in national parks—including maps, brochures, outdoor signs, visitor center exhibits, films, and digital kiosks.

 

“Map Illiterate” vs. “Map Aware”

Image

In the past, many map makers have also used Macromedia FreeHand (acquired by Adobe in 2005 and since discontinued), CorelDRAW, Canvas, or even more recent entrants with a map-specific slant such as Ortelius, proving that a graphics environment has long been regarded as a good and viable one for their trade. As well, for many years, Esri has offered an Illustrator export option from its GIS products, proving that Illustrator, in particular, has long been the preferred work environment for making maps. However, Lambert points out that those files exported from Esri’s GIS products are devoid of geographic properties once imported into Illustrator. He has been with National Geographic for 21 years. His team used to work with Illustrator, which was already the graphic design standard, but used Esri software to design maps, which they then exported as Illustrator files from Esri and imported to Illustrator. “Once we brought that into the Illustrator format, it lost all geospatial awareness,” Lambert recalls. In essence, the file became “map illiterate.” In 2011, he switched to using MAPublisher after learning how easy it made it to incorporate GIS data into Illustrator workflows.

To explain the advantages of using MAPublisher to keep graphic elements “map aware”, Lambert cites three examples:

  1.  The Great Salt Lake has shrunk in size over the years. “Prior to 2010, somebody would export a lake boundary and then bring it into Adobe Illustrator, where it might be re-scaled and transformed with an Illustrator function to fit the area of another map,” Lambert recalls. Now, with MAPublisher, National Geographic can use the same lake boundary in its maps of Utah, of the United States, and of the world, in each case simply reprojecting it on the fly without having to first export it to GIS software.
  2. Many of National Geographic’s nearly 300 outdoor recreation maps overlap one another at different scales. When, for example, Great Smoky Mountain National Park produces a new trail dataset reflecting changes in trails, National Geographic can now incorporate those changes much more quickly than ever before by simply transforming them through different map projections in the geospatially-aware files.
  3. The boundary between Pakistan and India is constantly changing. National Geographic can now make each change just once, then move it from its world map to its map of Asia and other products.

 

Starting in a Common Projection

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National Geographic starts working on any new map products in MAPublisher. “We want to get off on the right foot, so we make sure that they are all in the common projection from the very beginning,” Lambert explains. His team uses MAPublisher right from the start to georeference files and then to incorporate additional GIS data from federal, state, and county agencies into them. “For example,” Lambert says, “if we get a data set from the National Park Service, we are able to quickly import it and split it into the different layers and styles throughout our entire map series. We can see which trails might be hiking trails, horse trails, or mountain biking trails and quickly apply our styles. We also receive information from the U.S. Geological Survey, such as national hydrological data sets.”

MAPublisher allows users to work in a GIS environment from inside Adobe Illustrator. For example, they can bring in a transportation data set from a county, then click on a road in Adobe Illustrator and bring up a MAPublisher viewing panel to display its attributes, such as its name, whether it is paved, and, if it is not, its clearance. “We can see all the information that these agencies are assigning to these different lines,” Lambert says. “Adobe Illustrator and MAPublisher work together seamlessly.” By contrast, he points out, with other programs you have to exit one and go into the other.

Reconciling Conflicting Data

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Most of Patterson’s work revolves around making those very familiar black-banded brochures that visitors receive when they enter a national park. He began using MAPublisher in the mid-1990s, when Avenza introduced version 1.0. “We had just started converting our maps from manual production to digital production using Adobe Illustrator as our primary drawing software,” he recalls. “Soon afterward, geospatial data started becoming more available and the quality greatly improved. Of course, we wanted some means to bring these data into the graphic environment of Adobe Illustrator. MAPublisher provided us with the ideal tool for doing just that.”

Early on, Patterson’s team only used MAPublisher to import geospatial vector data into Adobe Illustrator to produce non-georeferenced maps. As the years went by, however, it saw the value of creating entirely geo-referenced maps.

To create a new map of a national park, Patterson’s team begins with an Adobe Illustrator template that contains all of the map layers that it would use for a typical NPS map—including lines, area colors, symbols, and labels. For even greater efficiency, it employs targeted layers with graphical styles applied to them. “A big part of our process at the beginning,” he explains, “is going on an online digital scavenger hunt, essentially finding whatever data we can that is in the public domain, from which we can compile our maps. We then import these various geospatial data sets into the Adobe Illustrator environment with MAPublisher.”

“The most time consuming aspect of map production is reconciling conflicting data,” says Patterson. “For example, analyzing and fixing different road data sources that don’t match with one another is an arduous process. However, thanks to the data manipulation tools in MAPublisher—which allows us to select, sort, and manipulate data by attribute—this task is now much easier.”

Patterson’s team updates NPS maps every year or two or three, depending on each park’s popularity. Working with a geographically-aware MAPublisher document allows it to take the previous printing of its map and import new data into it, which then drops into place where it should. For example, if a park builds a new trail, the park GIS specialist will send Patterson’s team a shapefile for that trail that it can quickly and easily import using MAPublisher. “It just works seamlessly,” says Patterson. Additionally, almost all NPS maps have shade relief art in the background. “We generate the shaded relief and then manipulate it using Avenza’s Geographic Imager tool in Adobe Photoshop. The result is a geographically aware Photoshop file of the shaded relief, which MAPublisher will automatically register to map line work in Adobe Illustrator.”

Geospatial PDFs

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Another very important feature of Avenza’s software, Patterson says, is that it enables his team to save all of its printed maps as electronic files in geospatial PDF format for dissemination via the Avenza Maps app and accompanying digital map store direct to digital devices such as smart phones and tablets. Park visitors can then download and use these maps on their location-enabled mobile devices and, because the maps are geospatially aware, a little blue dot will show their location at all times as they explore a park, even in the absence of a cellular data connection.

Before publishing a new map of a national park, Patterson’s team typically field checks it, saved as a geospatial PDF, using the Avenza Maps app on an iPhone. “We refer to this draft map as we canvas the park,” Patterson says. “We can take notes right in the Avenza Maps app, drop locator pins, and record tracks. When finished field checking, we e-mail the data to ourselves and import it into the working map file through MAPublisher. The notes and tracks that we recorded in the field are used to update the final map, improving accuracy.”

One goal of Patterson’s team is to increase online access to NPS maps. “We are pretty excited about some of the new capabilities in MAPublisher,” says Patterson, “particularly, saving our park maps as Web tiles. We are going through a multi-year transformation right now, converting our maps from the UTM coordinate system to the Web Mercator coordinate system for compatibility with Google Maps, Bing Maps, and Apple Maps. We do all of this through the ‘Export Document to Web Tiles’ feature in MAPublisher, which is really pretty cool.”

Patterson’s team also recently began experimenting with MAPublisher’s Map Web Author tool, which allows quick and easy creation of data-rich and interactive HTML5 web maps from GIS data. It produced a prototype for Harpers Ferry National Historical Park that contains layered information and the ability to explore the map interactively. For example, it allows park visitors to compare contemporary photographs to those taken during the Civil War era at various viewpoints throughout the park.

Other Specialized Illustrator Plugins

There are dozens of plugins that extend Illustrator’s capabilities, for example to edit vector data, concatenate multiple paths, or precisely position nearby objects. Here is one list of Illustrator plugins. CADtools and VectorScribe are particularly noteworthy in this context, because they show that a professional base of CAD users like Illustrator as their working environment, just as GIS and mapping professionals do.

HotDoor’s CADtools 10 plugin provides an extensive set of CAD capabilities—including drawing, editing, labeling, dimensioning, transformation, creation, and utility tools—inside Illustrator. For example, users can insert dimensions or labels on objects, paths, or points in space, which update in real time in response to changes in the artwork. The can also move, transform, and measure objects with precision.

VectorScribe enables users to reduce file sizes by eliminating excess points while maintaining the shape of paths; slide points along paths, extends paths, or trim them; accomplish complex vector editing, such as adding points to tangencies, reverse paths, or smoothly connect curves to straight lines; edit corners on dynamic shapes; or dynamically measure distances and areas along paths.

Conclusions

The sources of geospatial data now include unmanned aerial vehicles (UAS), the Internet of Things (IOT), and myriad consumer devices and, consequently, the amount of available geospatial data is growing exponentially. At the same time, professionals and consumers now expect location to be routinely embedded in everything they do on their digital devices. MAPublisher helps cartographers keep up with this accelerating cycle of supply and demand by making it easier and faster for them to make beautiful maps. Recent attempts by other GIS software vendors to address the increasing demand for cartography and map creation within the Adobe environment is evidence that making maps in Adobe Illustrator is the preferred way to go. With MAPublisher leading the way, it is a workflow that is here to stay.

Optimizing Point Symbol Placement with MAPublisher LabelPro

This post was contributed by Hans van der Maarel of Red Geographics.


The problem with using GIS data for point symbols is that depending on the scale and symbolization you often end up with symbols partly overlapping each other. Of course, the symbols can be manually moved around after initial placement to get a more aesthetically pleasing result, but that can be a tedious and time-intensive task.

Thankfully, there is a way to automate at least part of this process by using MAPublisher and LabelPro.

Example map of Breda, The Netherlands

This example shows the heart of an old European city (Breda in The Netherlands to be exact). The map is composed of Dutch Top10NL topographic base data, a few labels were manually added for larger features (such as the park), and points imported from OpenStreetMap (OSM) and styled using a Map Theme. As you can see, there are a number of spots where the symbols are densely located and overlap each other.

The MAPublisher LabelPro add-on is capable of collision-avoidance to make sure overlaps don’t happen. But it only works when generating labels (text). Fortunately, the solution is to trick LabelPro into processing symbols too, so that they can benefit from better placement without overlaps.

Let’s start by adding a column to the attributes to the OSM points layer and filling it with a default value, a capital O.

Thankfully, there is a way to automate at least part of this process by using MAPublisher and LabelPro.

Editing the attribute schema

Next, determine how big the symbols are. On the artboard, use the Type tool to place a capital O and adjust its size so that it’s about the same size as one of the point symbols. In this case, a 14 pt Futura Medium, shown here in red, seems to cover it well (your results might be different).

Determine the approximate font size

Futura is a good font in this case because the O is a perfect circle. Once you’ve determined the approximate font size to use, delete the O text as it won’t be needed anymore.

Next, set up the LabelPro labelling rules. Since there is already a layer with the manually placed labels and the symbols shouldn’t interfere with them, the manually placed labels will be designated as an obstacle layer. The symbols layer will be labelled with the attribute created earlier and the style set to the font and size that was just determined.

Set obstacle layer

Setting the appropriate rules partly depends on personal preference but it’s important to specify that the placement prefers the center position (position 1 on the placement control). In other words: if there’s enough space for placement, the label doesn’t need to be moved or offset. Another important rule to configure is that font reduction should be turned off. All of the labels (eventually symbols) are going to be a fixed and similar size.

Set placement point rules
Set fitting point rules

Also, another good practice is to specify a suppression layer. Any labels that can’t be placed with the rules set will be placed on the suppression layer. After placement, you can determine if any labels need to be adjusted manually.

Let’s label! Go ahead and label with these settings and afterward hide the original symbols layer and the suppression layer. The map is filled with O’s where the original symbols are located.

O labels placed

At first glance, this does not seem very useful, but closer inspection shows that the labels have retained the attributes of the original OSM point symbols.

Attributes migrated to the O labels

This means that if they can be turned back into points, they will be able to be styled!

In order to turn them back into points, a text reference point needs to be created. In other words: a little dot on the text selection line, in the center of the O. This is a two-step process. First, select all the O’s on the artboard, open MAPublisher Text Utilities, and set the Action to Set text alignment and Alignment to Center. This action changes the alignment of the text without changing the actual position of the text (due to LabelPro labeling the text alignment is different based on where the label ended up in relation to the original point). This step takes care of the horizontal positioning.

Set text alignment in MAPublisher Text Utilities

The second step is to adjust vertical positioning. Vertical positioning is adjusted by moving all text up by a certain distance. Make sure all the O’s are selected, then use the (Adobe Illustrator) Move tool. In the Position group, set the Horizontal to 0 (no adjustment here since Text Utilities was used), set the Vertical to minus half the text size (font size in this example was 14 pt, so a vertical adjustment of -7 pt), and the Angle to 90 degrees.

Use the Move panel to fine tune position

For reference, this example is zoomed into a symbol that did not get displaced.

Next, these labels need to be turned into point symbols. There is a handy option in MAPublisher Text Utilities that can do that, but it places a point to the lower left of the text and the symbols need to use the center text reference point that was just created. Instead, with all of the O labels selected, open the MAP Attributes panel and export the attribute table to a text file. Make sure to specify the option Export All Attributes because there are two important hidden attributes needed to make this work: #MapX and #MapY, which are the coordinates of the text reference point.

Export attributes to a .txt file
(Click for larger version)
Export attributes to a .txt file

Using MAPublisher Import, add the attributes text file that was just created to the map and make sure to appropriately specify #MapX and #MapY in the X and Y coordinate columns.

Import .txt file as Delimited XY

Since there is no projection information stored in the text file, you’ll need to specify that the coordinates are in the same system as the MAP View it’s coming from and you’ll need to add it to that MAP View upon import.

On the map, there is now a new point layer and because they still have all of their original attributes, the layer can simply be added to the MAP Theme to have all the point symbols reapplied to them instantly. Let’s admire the results:

Symbols reapplied with MAP Themes

If needed, repeat the last few steps for the suppressed labels as well (to a different file and different layer of course) to see what still needs to be done manually.

How to Create and Style Highway Shields with MAPublisher LabelPro

MAPublisher LabelPro intelligently labels your map layers using custom rules and styles. One of the popular uses of this feature is to create highway shields. The result is a cleaner map and is widely used on road maps around the world. While MAPublisher has many default options for highway shields, it is possible to create custom shields to improve your map as well. This blog will outline the steps to create and customize highway shields for your map.

Step One

Import your data into MAPublisher, ensuring your road line data has an attribute field for highway route numbers. Highway shields can work with any data type, however, traditional highway shields are created with a highway number with no additional characters. Using the integer data type enforces this and is recommended for highway shields.

 

Step Two

On the MAPublisher toolbar, in the Labels subsection, click the MAP LabelPro button.

 

Step Three

On the MAP LabelPro dialog box, click the Setup Layers button. This allows you to select which layers are going to be labeled or used as obstacles. This means you can label multiple features at the same time as the highway shields. Click the checkbox next to your roads layer and click OK.

 

Step Four

Optionally, you may want to only create highway shields on some of the roads within your road layer. For example, if your roads layer also contains roads that are not highways, you don’t want them labelled with a highway shield. The solution is to create a Label Filter. To do this, first create a new filter by clicking Add label filter button at the bottom of the dialog box. Next, in the Label Filter section, select Limit by expression and click the Edit icon. This opens the Expression Builder dialog box. In this example, the expression entered selects only roads that have a jurisdiction designated as “Federal” or “Province”. Only these roads will be labelled with a highway shield.

 

Step Five

If you didn’t create a label filter, click the layer in the Source list you would like to label. On the right side, ensure that the “Is labeled” checkbox is checked. Immediately below, in the Label Source drop-down, select the field that contains the highway route numbers.

 

Step Six

Select or create a rule from the Rules drop-down. The pre-defined Highways and Interstate rules that are included with MAPublisher follow conventional mapping patterns, but if you want to customize the setup of your shields, click the Edit button. Once you are satisfied with your rules, click OK to return to the MAP LabelPro dialog box.

 

Step Seven

To customize the appearance of the shields, click the Edit button beside the Style drop-down. To add highway shields, click the Label with symbol check box to enable its settings. The Symbol file is the shield library, where you can pick between Canadian, US State and generic shields. The Symbol drop-down is where you can pick the shield from the shield library specified. All shields will have the same symbol, if you want multiple shield shapes on your map, you’ll have to create label filters as outlined previously in step four. The Font family, Font Style, Size, Colour and Label case affect the appearance of the text within the shield. Click OK when finished setting the style.

 

Step Eight

Back in the MAP LabelPro main dialog box, click the “Output suppressed labels to” check box. This moves all excess labels such as duplicate shields or shields that clash with other features on your map to a Suppressed layer. You can view features on the Suppressed layer after to see which labels were not included and you can decide to keep or delete them.

 

Step Nine

Click Label to begin the labeling process.

 

Step Ten

When all of your shields are generated, you can do some additional customization. In the Illustrator Layers panel, select all of your shields. From here, any changes to the colour, stroke colour and other settings you would use on objects, will be applied to your shields. With this functionality, you can create the exact shields you want for your map.

Handling GeoJSON Files with Unspecified Projected Coordinate Systems

In the latest GeoJSON specification (2016), the coordinate reference system for all coordinates is a geographic coordinate reference system—using the World Geodetic System 1984 (WGS 84) datum—with longitude and latitude units of decimal degrees. The previous specification (2008) allowed for the use of alternative coordinates systems, but this was removed because of interoperability issues.

MAPublisher still recognizes GeoJSON files with a specified coordinate system even though it is no longer officially supported. However, if no coordinate system is specified, MAPublisher will assume the coordinates are in WGS 84. Occasionally, this may cause a problem of improperly formatted files that contain projected coordinates but have no specified coordinate system. In this case, users will need to either choose a coordinate system during import or modify the GeoJSON file by adding a coordinate reference system (CRS) object manually.

Selecting a Coordinate System on Import

To change the coordinate system using the Import dialog box, click Advanced and select the WGS 84 link under Coordinate System. Ignore the warning about changing the coordinate system by clicking “Replace coordinate system”. Select the correct projected coordinate system from the list.

 

Modifying the GeoJSON File Manually

Coordinate reference systems can be specified in a GeoJSON file using a CRS object. You can view the contents of any GeoJSON file by opening it in a text editor such as Notepad. Copy and paste the text below after the line: “type”: “FeatureCollection”, (usually on line 2). Change the EPSG number to the correct CRS for your dataset. See Spatialreference.org to lookup an EPSG code.

"crs":
{
   "type" : "name",
   "properties" :
   {
      "name" : "EPSG:[EPSG Code]"
   }
},

Example:

The GeoJSON file can now be read properly by MAPublisher and can be imported as normal.

Cleanup Lines With MAPublisher Trim and Extend Tools

The latest release of MAPublisher includes the ability to trim and extend objects to a crossing or intersecting path. Extending a path lengthens it to meet the edge of a crossing object and trimming a path cuts the portion that extends past the edge of an intersecting path. Trim and extend tools are commonly used in CAD software and will greatly improve the ability to produce accurate and precise data in MAPublisher and clean-up imported data.

Location of the Trim and Extend tools on the Adobe Illustrator Tools panel. Click and hold the tool button to switch between MAP Trim Tool and MAP Extend Tool.

The MAP Trim Tool and MAP Extend Tools are located on the Adobe Illustrator Tools panel. Click and hold the MAP Trim or Map Extend tool button icon to switch between them. To use the tools, select the crossing or intersecting path and click the object to extend or trim. The diagram below illustrates the basic process.

Visualization of the trim and extend processes

There are many possible applications for these tools in digitizing and cleaning map data. In a hypothetical example illustrated below, we trim all the roads that extend past the edge of a border, and extend the imported roads (in bold) to meet the existing roads.

Examples of uses for the trim and extend tools. Extending imported roads to match existing roads and trimming lines that fall outside of a map border
Lines trimmed and extended!

Use MAPublisher to Import Layers from ArcGIS Online Directly Into Adobe Illustrator

With the latest release of MAPublisher 9.9, it’s now possible to easily import layers directly from an ArcGIS Online account or an ArcGIS web service. This will allow you to use shared data layers within your ArcGIS Online organizational account and connect to publicly available map servers from various online sources.

ArcGIS Online is a collaborative web GIS that allows you to store and share GIS data using Esri’s secure cloud. Before, you may have had to download layers as shapefiles to your local machine and then import them into Adobe Illustrator using MAPublisher. Now, MAPublisher has a much improved workflow to get ArcGIS Online layers into Adobe Illustrator will full georeferencing, all map features, and attributes.

Currently, the types of datasets allowed are Feature Layers, Map Image Layers and Tile Layers. To load a layer, use MAPublisher Import as you would with any data type and select ArcGIS Online from the Format drop-down menu. Click the login link to enter your ArcGIS Online credentials to access your organization’s web portal.

Import ArcGIS Online dialog box
ArcGIS Online user portal

Feature Layers contain vector data that will import as artwork into Adobe Illustrator. Optionally, you can extract specific features using standard SQL queries. Map Image Layers and Tile Layers are raster data layers that can be added by selecting the geographic extents.

Import Image Map Layer

In addition to using your own organization’s data, you can connect to publicly available data from a wide variety of organizations by connecting to an ArcGIS Web Service. To connect to a web service, use MAPublisher Import and select ArcGIS Web Service from the Format drop-down menu. Click to select the dataset and enter the URL for the service. This is a great option when searching for data from open data portals created by government agencies.

Import ArcGIS Web Service
Valid ArcGIS Web Service

Accessing Esri’s online services through MAPublisher provides a great opportunity to use shared data within your organization and access a wide variety of publicly available data. We’re sure you’ll find it very useful for finding data to make great maps.

Isolating and Displaying Specific Grid and Graticule Lines

MAPublisher Grids and Graticules is a powerful tool. There are dozens of settings to create an indexed grid, measured grid, or graticule exactly the way you want. We often receive questions about how to create certain grid and graticule styles and this was interesting. We were asked how to create a graticule to display a very specific latitude and longitude, perhaps even by itself (only a single line of latitude or longitude).

Creating a single graticule line

In this example, we’re going to create a graticule that will only display the Tropic of Capricorn at -23.4371 degrees (or 23.4371 degrees south of the equator).

On the MAPublisher toolbar, click the Grids and Graticules button to open the dialog box. Click the Graticules button to create one. On the Graticules Grid main settings, the important setting to note here is the Pass through section — it specifies lines of latitude and longitude that must be included in the graticule. Enter 30 deg Long and -23.4371 deg Lat. This means that a graticule line must pass through -23.4371 degrees latitude (the Tropic of Capricorn). The reason why a line at 30 deg longitude is specified is to hide it from the map view (it is placed at 30 deg longitude outside of the map extent).

Pass through setting

In the Intervals section, set 90 deg Latitude interval and 180 deg Longitude interval. Because the intervals are at the extreme, this means that the the only lines left to display are the ones specified in the Pass through section (30 deg long and -23.4371 deg lat). In this case, it will only display a single line of latitude (the Tropic of Capricorn) for the graticule.

Intervals setting

If you want to label the graticule, go to the Line Labels setting. Click the Lat and Lng on the grid label control to enable them. To control how many decimals are displayed, click the Format setting, then change the number of decimals to something greater than 0.

Label settings

To intersect single lines of longitude and latitude, adjust the Pass through setting so that the line is within the map’s extent. In this case, it was set to -50 deg (50 deg west).

Intersect single lines of longitude and latitude

Remember that you can share Grids and Graticules settings with anybody by clicking the Save Settings button, selecting a destination folder and sharing the configuration files.

The Difference Between Constraints and Bounds in a Graticule

A graticule is the network of lines of latitude and longitude drawn at regular intervals on a map. Graticules are created in MAPublisher using the Grids and Graticules tool. In some maps, you may want to limit the area on the map that a graticule covers. For example, you may want it to cover only the map’s area of interest. The image below is a map of North America with a graticule drawn at 5-degree intervals. US State boundaries are drawn in white. In this post, we’ll modify the graticule three times so it conforms to the edges of the image, so it covers only the Continental United States, and lastly a combination of the previous two modifications.

North America with a graticule of 5 degree intervals.

MAPublisher can limit the geographic extents of a graticule in two ways: using Grid Bounds and using Grid Constraints. In both cases, you’ll specify the lower left and upper right corners of the graticule. Specifying Grid Bounds will limit the extent of the graticule to a rectangular area while specifying Grid Constraints will limit the graticule along lines of latitude and longitude. If both Grid Bounds and Grid Constraints are specified, the graticule will cover an intersection of the two areas. The image below shows bounds and the constraints and the intersecting area which forms the graticule.

Bounds and the constraints and the intersecting area which forms the graticule.

To modify a graticule so that it conforms to the edges of the image, you’ll need to specify grid constraints. In the Grids and Graticules dialog box, click the Specify Grid Constraints check box and set the Lower Left and Upper Right corners to the corners of the image which are -127°, 7° and -50°, 65° respectively.

Specifying Grid Constraints.

To create a rectangular graticule covering only the lower 48 states, click the Specify Grid Bounds check box and set the Lower Left and Upper Right corners to the corners of that area. Tip: click the MAP World Locations drop-down arrow to choose the values for the lower left and upper right corners.

Specifying Grid Bounds.

When both Specify Grid Bounds and Specify Grid Constraints check boxes are both checked, the graticule will cover an intersection of each of the extents. For instance, in the map below, the northern extent follows the 49th parallel at the Canadian border, the western extent is at the edge of the image (127° west) and the south and east extents are the same as in the previous map.

Both Specify Grid Bounds and Specify Grid Constraints selected.



 

Easy Map Creation with WFS and WMS

Online services can be used to create high-quality maps without the need to download and maintain large spatial datasets or spend time designing base maps. In this post, we’ll use two online sources to import data and create a map showing the potential energy generated from existing and proposed wind power projects in the state of Massachusetts.

Wind map

There are two types of online mapping services MAPublisher can use to import layers: Web Map Services (WMS) and Web Feature Services (WFS). WMS is an interface for accessing geo-registered images from an online source. This means that users aren’t able to modify individual elements of a WMS layer and are only able to select an area of the map to import. WMS also allows for transparency so map layers can be overlaid on top of one another.

WFS, on the other hand, is an interface for accessing vector map features in GML format. Features are imported as a MAP Layer which can be further modified using MAPublisher and Illustrator tools. To create this map, we’ll import data from two sources: a topo map from the US Geological Survey (USGS) and the Massachusetts Office of Geographic Information (MassGIS).

To start, open Adobe Illustrator and create a new document in portrait mode. Import a MAP Layer and select Web Feature Service from the Format drop-down. Click the “Click to select services and layer(s)”. link. The MassGIS layers are included with MAPublisher by default. If you do not see this service, click Load Services from Avenza. Select Commonwealth of Massachusetts, USA – MassGIS in the USA folder.

Selecting WFS for import

On the Select Features dialog box, select Wind Power. Note the default SRS – EPSG 26986. On the Import dialog box, click the link to select a coordinate system. Choose Massachusetts Mainland Zone (EPSG 26986). Click OK.

WFS information

The Wind Projects layer has been imported as a MAP Layer. It can be modified using MAPublisher or Illustrator tools to symbolize, label, select, and so forth. To create the style for this layer, add a new Stylesheet MAP Theme of Point feature type, then Batch generate rules for the KW column using three quantiles, and select Set scale so the symbols scale proportionally to the value. For more on how to replicate this style, see the MAPublisher Help article MAP Themes.

Wind point attributes (click to see larger image)
Batch generate rules

The next step is to import a WMS layer to use as a base layer. This map uses the USGS Topo Base Map which was created as part of the National Map program. A list of WMS and WFS services provided by USGS is available at http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/services/.

Go to the USGS web page and open the WMS link under Base Maps (Cached) > USGS Topo Base Map – Primary Tile Cache (Tiled). This is an XML document with the location and metadata of the WMS. Copy the link from the address bar and in Adobe Illustrator, click the MAPublisher Import button and choose Web Map Service from the Format drop-down menu. Click the “Click to select service and image” link. Click Add New Service and paste the URL into the GetCapabilities URL text box. Choose the service from the list and click OK.

Add new service

On the Select Web Map Layer dialog box, choose USGS Topo Base Map from the Layers list. Set the Image Size to 1000 to increase the resolution. To change the extents of the output image click Select Area. This dialog box provides several options for setting the extents of the base map image. Click-and-drag to specify an area to select – the image will automatically crop. The buttons at the top of the panel allow you to enter the coordinate extents manually, match the extents of a MAP View or match the extents of a vector layer. Since we have already added the Wind Power layer to the map, we will set the extents to match this map view by clicking “Select area by MAP View” and choosing Wind_Projects from the drop-down menu. Leave the other options as default and import the base map image.

Select area

For the final step, open the MAP View panel and drag the layer DMARRIER.EEA_WIND_Point to the MAP View USGS_TNM_Toppo_Base_Map. This will transform the points to the same coordinate system as the base map.

There are thousands of freely available WMS and WFS sources available online. For a good starting place see this blog post from the Open Geospatial Consortium for advice on finding services. You could also use a basic web search – for example – “WMS Toronto” or similar. For more help on web services in MAPublisher see the help article Web Map/Feature Service.

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