making good quality maps with xarax

[hmck]

Hi

I am fairly new to xarax and I wondered if there might be any readers of this forum who have experience of using it to make maps. What I am doing is to reproduce out of copyright OS (Ordnance Survey) maps. You put a bitmap of the original in as your background then maybe 10 layers to accommodate contours, rivers, roads etc.

Xara has some very powerful features that seem ideal for this kind of work so I was wondering if anybody else had done anything similar. The kind of thing I am aiming for are maps that I will get printed and published. So they have to be pretty good. That said there is no need for, for example, 10 metre contours or every house or the like. Just whatever is required.

I have tried many different programmes ranging from photoshop to specialist map making products. All have their drawbacks though photoshop was pretty good if somewhat tedious. The all important text can be neatly done in quarkxpress so that at least is not a requirement. But the basic map making definitely is.

Any advice would be gratefully received.

Hugh McKerrell

[hmck]

Hi

I am fairly new to xarax and I wondered if there might be any readers of this forum who have experience of using it to make maps. What I am doing is to reproduce out of copyright OS (Ordnance Survey) maps. You put a bitmap of the original in as your background then maybe 10 layers to accommodate contours, rivers, roads etc.

Xara has some very powerful features that seem ideal for this kind of work so I was wondering if anybody else had done anything similar. The kind of thing I am aiming for are maps that I will get printed and published. So they have to be pretty good. That said there is no need for, for example, 10 metre contours or every house or the like. Just whatever is required.

I have tried many different programmes ranging from photoshop to specialist map making products. All have their drawbacks though photoshop was pretty good if somewhat tedious. The all important text can be neatly done in quarkxpress so that at least is not a requirement. But the basic map making definitely is.

Any advice would be gratefully received.

Hugh McKerrell

[Lottie]

If you haven't found it already you might want to have a look at this tutorial:

http://www.xaraxone.com/guest/guest02/index.htm

It's about creating an interactive map in Flash but the initial work tracing a bitmap map may be useful.

Lottie

[Egg Bramhill]

Welcome to the forum.
Xara is excellent at map production. A note of warning though. All OS maps are copyright so you just can't go ahead by scanning & tracing above them, printing them out and selling them. Let's face it, it's taken surveyors years of work to produce these maps, so you can't just go ahead and rip them off. You'd have a hard time convincing a court that you'd done the surveying yourself.
One of the best tips I know for producing roads is to draw all the say major roads. Select all the lines, give them a black line colour and a line width of say 4. Clone these lines, give them a line colour of dark green and a line width of 3. It gives a good road like line. You can further enhance this by making the lines into shapes and then adding shapes.
Egg

[gwpriester]

Lottie and Hugh

Good to have you with us. In my army days (Viet Nam era) I was a cartographic draftsman. I have not created a map since :-)

Gary

Gary Priester

Moderator Person

<a href="http://www.gwpriester.com">
www.gwpriester.com </a>


XaraXone

[Ross Macintosh]

I recently had reason to copy a topo survey in Xara. It went well. Using the 'pen'tool greatly speeds up the task of creating the curved contours vs. using Xara's other line creation methods. I drew them in red over top a scanned background layer that had black lines. The red made it very easy to see what I was drawing. Afterwards I made the scan invisible and changed my lines to final colours (other than red).

Egg's method he mentioned with the cloned lines is a great tool if you are drawing road maps. I've used the approach effectively many times since Egg first described the technique.

Regards, Ross

<a href=http://www.designstop.com/>DesignStop.Com</a>

[hmck]

Just a brief note of thanks to Lottie, Egg, Ross and Gary for their helpful encouragement. I have now read Egg's tutorial on making maps with xarax and this seems perfectly clear. In fact I made one such in 10 minutes last night that far surpassed anything I had done so far with photoshop. I just wish I had found xarax sooner.

Again my thanks

Hugh McKerrell
Isle of Arran
Scoatlnd

[gwpriester]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR> I just wish I had found xarax sooner.
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Better late than never, eh ;-)

Gary

Gary Priester

Moderator Person

<a href="http://www.gwpriester.com">
www.gwpriester.com </a>


XaraXone

[hmck]

Just a brief postscript to Egg's comment about all UK Ordnance Survey maps being copyrighted. This is not so. Any PUBLISHED maps that are more than 50 years old are out of copyright and can be copied at will. Now you might think that 50 years is rather a long time but for many parts of the UK there is almost no difference between then and now. Of course trees have been grown but rivers, coasts, roads, contours etc. have not changed.

You can easily get any OS map on CD for about ten UK pounds and in Scotland, where I live, the source is the National Library of Scotland.

So copy and, as they say, be damned.

Hugh McKerrell