Using Xara Xtreme for map illlustrations

**cursor** · 20 July 2009, 01:16 AM

I've promised my 85 year old father (an anthropologist ... who just can't retire {thank God =)}) that I'll handle all the mapping illustrations for his latest book. Geographically, the target area is mesoamerica (southern Mexico and northern Central America).

Might any of you have experience or recommendations about how to proceed?

The path that I'm considering includes purchasing graphical data from GeoSpacial.com (sample data), then process it through Xara Extreme ... tracing coloring, blending, etc. as required.

Any constructive input is vastly appreciated.

Gracias amigos. =)

**gwpriester** · 20 July 2009, 01:22 AM

Curt

Egg is the expert here. He will probably respond in in about 12 hours.

**Albacore** · 20 July 2009, 09:19 AM

Had a large one to do for my area so like you I bought the area map from Ordinance Survey in the UK through an local agent, the council, it still cost me £175 but it saved hours of work. O.S. give out the maps as a layered PDF with different details on each layer. Had loads of clipping masks to release an some I had to edit and I did all of this in AI as, as this was about 4 years ago the PDF import was not as good as it is now. Once I had all the editing done I then brought it in to XPro and developed different type of brushes to represent different areas that I wanted to show like council wards, prosed changes to our Local Development Plan and I used this map again for various other jobs. The one thing that I had to do was to buy more memory for the computer as I could not open it when it first arrive the PDF file was so large.

**Sadler** · 20 July 2009, 09:20 AM

I would recommend that you sit down with your dad and go over the number and types of maps he thinks he'll need. Then talk to geospacial and get a cost for publishing the derived versions of their GIS data. Hopefully the costs of this route won't be inhibitive. It will be good to get maps from a reputable supplier since that will add to the authority of the book but perhaps approach other GIS data providers too. It depends on how key the maps will be for the book.

As to processing the maps, that would depend on the type of map, the data format and organisation you can get from the data supplier and how much accuracy your looking for. Perhaps you just want accurate outlines and you'll be illustrating population migrations (just guessing here). I would think that your father would have maps he's used during his research?

Anyway, probably not much help on the graphics side but perhaps some things to think about.

**cursor** · 20 July 2009, 08:47 PM

Thanks for the constructive input so far.

I'm certainly looking forward to any additional advice that Egg might offer.

**Egg Bramhill** · 21 July 2009, 01:15 AM

Hi Curtis,

I believe Albacore has the correct solution. If your going to print a map you'll need a good vector source file. For example
HERE
These maps are in eps format or the more expensive one is in ai with layers and are Royalty Free.

I don't know anything about ESRI ShapeFile vector format on the Go Spacial web site but I wouldn't believe it would be very simple to import into XX if at all possible.

I assume you want to overlay your fathers information onto a map. The purchased map may have a lot of detail you probably don't want like modern highways etc but provided it's vector you can delete these etc and just use the remaining map data then overlay your fathers features.

I wouldn't recommend drawing it from scratch as you'll always have the problem of where you got the original map data from in the first place. For example, Google maps is happy for you to link a map on your website but you can't use it commercially. So even if you hand traced over the top of a screen grab you may well be breaking all sorts of copyright rules. After all cartography doesn't come cheap.

**juergen** · 21 July 2009, 06:31 AM

The CIA has a lot of published information on their website including maps in .pdf format.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publicat...s/refmaps.html

Could be lots of work though as you dont get nicely seperated layers that way.

Juergen

**Albacore** · 21 July 2009, 09:35 AM

I would doubt that you could open an EPS in Xara knowing what the filter is like. Too many fonts and text although if you have a friend with AI they could save it as a PDF for you.