Que vous soyez un professionnel des SIG ou que vous débutiez tout juste dans le domaine, cette formation vous propose de prendre en main MAPublisher® de manière approfondie! Rejoignez nos amis de Géom@tique du 27 au 31 mai pour cette formation en ligne! Les inscriptions et plus d’informations sont disponibles sur leur site web.
Whether you’re new to GIS or an experienced user, this course will give you an in-depth introduction to MAPublisher® in French! Join our friends at Géom@tique from May 27th to 31st for this online training! Sign ups and more information are available on their website.
Whether you’re new to MAPublisher®, an experienced user, or simply thinking about a purchase, Avenza software training is a worthwhile experience. Get hands-on training from Avenza product specialists at one of our training courses around North America or virtually from anywhere.
Whether you’re new to MAPublisher®, an experienced user, or simply thinking about a purchase, Avenza software training is a worthwhile experience. Get hands-on training from Avenza product specialists at one of our training courses around North America or virtually from anywhere.
Que vous soyez un professionnel des SIG ou que vous débutiez tout juste dans le domaine, cette formation vous propose de prendre en main MAPublisher® de manière approfondie! Rejoignez nos amis de Géom@tique du 2 au 6 décembre pour cette formation en ligne! Les inscriptions et plus d’informations sont disponibles sur leur site web.
Whether you’re new to GIS or an experienced user, this course will give you an in-depth introduction to MAPublisher® in French! Join our friends at Géom@tique from December 2nd to 6th for this online training! Sign ups and more information are available on their website.
We are showcasing the Open-category winner of the 2021 Avenza Map Competition. This fantastic entry was created by Roger Smith, expert cartographer and owner of Geographx in Wellington, New Zealand. Roger’s grand-prize winning entry is a truly remarkable display of map craftsmanship. The map provides a detailed look at the topography and trail coverage surrounding one of New Zealand’s most beautiful wilderness areas. His expert usage of natural colour basemaps and shaded relief creates a truly stunning result.
This topographic map focuses on the area covered by Westland Tai Poutini National Park, Aoraki/Mount Cook National Park, and the adjacent conservation parks and designated wilderness areas. It presents park boundaries, back-country walking trails, and the many camping shelters that are scattered throughout the area. The map itself is designed for print as a wall map and utilizes a natural colour basemap to create an eye-catching visual guide for the region.
The map can be used to familiarize park visitors with the area and assist recreational visitors with trip-planning in the rugged back-country trails of the area. The natural colour basemap is designed to maximize viewer understanding and appreciation of the physical environment while providing a pleasing backdrop that highlights important points, trails and places on the map.
Select the images below to see a detailed look at Roger’s map
Making the Map
The cartographic design elements and vector art creation utilized a wide range of tools in MAPublisher. Some of the vector data that went into the map were obtained through the New Zealand Department of Conservation, and the Land Information Department, while others were custom-crafted by Roger and his team at Geographx. Notably, the Geographx team custom-built the natural colour basemap and DEM-derived hillshade that gives the map its unique look and feel.
MAPublisher allowed Roger to import his data layers into an Adobe Illustrator environment that was conducive to flexible cartographic design work. Using the MAP Views panel, he could easily adjust and modify the projection and scaling of his map. Where necessary, Roger leveraged the many MAPublisher Geoprocessing and Data Editing tools to manipulate or simplify vector art layers for better representation on the final map.
As MAPublisher maintains spatial referencing for each data layer, he could place and register his custom natural colour, and raster hillshade layers to create his basemap. Fine-tuning would ensure his vector layers (including roads, campsites, trails, and place markers) would all be accurately placed and aligned with their real-world locations.
Roger created unique labels for the hundreds of different placemarks and trail lines on the maps. Using MAP Attribute data that are retained for each data layer, Roger used the Label Features tool to efficiently create and place labels for each layer. With Label Features, Roger could define custom rules that ensure each label stands apart from the other. For important place markers and points of interest, Roger used the Create Halos tool to make certain labels stand out more prominently.
Needless to say, this spectacular piece of work represents the culmination of countless hours of design effort and dedication. Roger has added this map to the impressive collection of cartographic works produced by Geographx. To learn more about other fantastic map products available from Geographx, visit their website.
Toronto, ON, August 31, 2022 – Avenza Systems Inc., producers of the Avenza Maps® app for mobile devices and geospatial extensions for Adobe Creative Cloud®, including Geographic Imager® for Adobe Photoshop®, is pleased to announce the release of MAPublisher® 11.0 for Adobe Illustrator®. This version offers full compatibility with the Apple Silicon processor, enhancements to the MAP Attributes panel, a revamped welcome screen, the ability to import OpenStreetMap file formats, a brand new set of MAP Erase tools, and several performance improvements and bug fixes.
MAPublisher cartography software seamlessly integrates more than seventy GIS mapping tools into Adobe Illustrator to help you create beautiful maps from geospatial data. Import industry-standard GIS data formats and make crisp, clean maps with all attributes and georeferencing intact using the Adobe Illustrator design environment.
New major features of the MAPublisher 11.0 extension for Adobe Illustrator include:
Apple Silicon Processor compatibility
MAP Attributes Panel enhancements: Users no longer need to select all attributes for them to appear by default in the features list, with show all/show only selected features toggle buttons
Welcome Screen revamp: Improved discoverability for users with more content to aid in getting started or inspired with MAPublisher
OpenStreetMap file format support: Import OpenStreetMap OSM and PBF file formats
MAP Erase tools: Quickly remove sensitive or unwanted data from maps with the MAP Vector Erase or MAP Erase by Shape tools
Users require a valid Adobe Creative Cloud subscription and a compatible operating system to utilize the improvements and enhancements offered in MAPublisher 11.0. For questions and information on how compatibility requirements may affect your organization, please contact our Support Centre.
MAPublisher 11.0 is immediately available free of charge to all current MAPublisher users with active maintenance and as an upgrade for non-maintenance users starting at US$649. New licenses are available from US$1499. MAPublisher FME-Auto and MAPublisher LabelPro are also available as add-ons starting at US$499. Academic, floating, and volume licenses are also available. Prices include one year of full maintenance. Read more about MAPublisher 11.0 in the release blog, or visit www.avenza.com/mapublisher for more details.
More about Avenza Systems Inc.
Avenza Systems Inc. is an award-winning, privately held corporation that provides cartographers and GIS professionals with powerful software tools to make better maps. Avenza also offers the mobile Avenza Maps app to sell, purchase, distribute, and use maps on iOS and Android devices. For further information contact: 416-487-5116 – info@avenza.com – www.avenza.com
Toronto, ON, November 9, 2021 – Avenza Systems Inc., producers of the Avenza Maps® app for mobile devices and geospatial extensions for Adobe Creative Cloud®, including Geographic Imager® for Adobe Photoshop®, is pleased to announce the release of MAPublisher® 10.9 for Adobe Illustrator®. This version offers compatibility with Adobe Illustrator 2022, Windows 11, and macOS 12. It also provides a variety of feature updates including the widely requested support for the vector GeoPackage and TopoJSON data formats, new Geodesic options for the Buffer Art tool, default filter on import and style on import options, and several performance improvements and bug fixes.
MAPublisher cartography software seamlessly integrates more than seventy GIS mapping tools into Adobe Illustrator to help you create beautiful maps from geospatial data. Import industry-standard GIS data formats and make crisp, clean maps with all attributes and georeferencing intact using the Adobe Illustrator design environment.
New major features of the MAPublisher 10.9 extension for Adobe Illustrator include:
Adobe Illustrator 2022 compatibility
Windows 11 and macOS 12 Monterey compatibility
TopoJSON support: Import TopoJSON data
GeoPackage support: Import and export vector GeoPackage data
Geodesic Buffer settings: Provides more accurate distance buffers on point data when working on features distant from lines of true scale
Default import filters and styles: Specify default options for filtering and displaying data that is imported into MAPublisher
Avenza announces that compatibility support is changing for its desktop mapping software. Starting with MAPublisher 10.9, both Windows 7 and Adobe CS6 will no longer be supported. Users will require a valid Adobe Creative Cloud subscription and a compatible operating system to utilize the improvements and enhancements offered in MAPublisher 10.9. For questions and more information on how these changes around compatibility may affect your organization, please contact our Support Centre.
MAPublisher 10.9 is immediately available free of charge to all current MAPublisher users with active maintenance and as an upgrade for non-maintenance users starting at US$649. New licenses are available from US$1499. MAPublisher FME-Auto and MAPublisher LabelPro are also available as add-ons starting at US$499. Academic, floating, and volume licenses are also available. Prices include one year of full maintenance. Read more about MAPublisher 10.9 in the release blog, or visit www.avenza.com/mapublisher for more details.
More about Avenza Systems Inc.
Avenza Systems Inc. is an award-winning, privately held corporation that provides cartographers and GIS professionals with powerful software tools to make better maps. Avenza also offers the mobile Avenza Maps app to sell, purchase, distribute, and use maps on iOS and Android devices.
Hans van der Maarel has been a passionate cartographer for over 20 years. He works out of Zevenbergen, Netherlands where he operates his company, Red Geographics. To Hans, cartography is a passion that extends beyond the office, becoming more than just a career path. Through this passion, Hans has developed a level of expertise found only in the most dedicated of map-making professionals. As an expert MAPublisher user, Hans has been a frequent contributor to the Avenza Resources Blog. You can see some of his latest work through his Georeferencing Techniques Video tutorials released as part of Avenza’s Mapping Class blog series. To read more about Red Geographics, and see more of Hans’s work, visit redgeographics.com.
From a young age, Hans always had a keen interest in maps. His found himself drawn to old atlasses, spending hours looking at old maps, and geography was always his favourite subject in school. This interest persisted into high school, where at a job fair he found out you could actually study map-making as a career.
Continuing his studies, Hans pursued a program in Geo-Informatics at Hogeschool Utrecht (a four-year bachelor’s level course offering a mix of geodesy, GIS, and cartography). There he was introduced to various kinds of mapping and surveying, learning the techniques necessary to plan and design meaningful effective maps. During an internship at the National Spatial Planning Agency, he was first introduced to the MAPublisher plug-in for Adobe Illustrator. After graduation he started working for his local Avenza partner, doing tech support, training, consultancy, and commercial map production processes. This is also where he was introduced to Safe Software and their product for data transformation, also known as Feature Manipulation Engine (FME).
Hans developed a niche within the Dutch cartographic community that leveraged FME to prepare raw source data before using MAPublisher to visualize and create the final high-quality map products. This type of workflow, combining a mix of both FME and MAPublisher functionalities is now fully realized by the FME Auto add-on for MAPublisher.
“I was doing my first internship and was tasked to produce a poster-sized map of The Netherlands in Adobe Illustrator, but all the base data was in Shapefiles or ArcInfo coverages. Gathering base data and generalizing it was done in a traditional GIS, but getting that data into Illustrator and making a finished map required MAPublisher.”
In September 2004, Hans decided to continue on his own and founded Red Geographics. Working largely with Avenza products, two years later, he became an official Avenza partner and reseller. As his customer base expanded and more projects came in, Red Geographics developed a reputation of being “the one for the difficult projects”. Reflecting on the early years of Red Geographic’s operation, Hans mentioned some of his more memorable, fun, and eye-catching projects.
“There was the Oolaalaa Globe, a 5 ft diameter “beanbag” globe with beautiful maps printed on spandex. We received several custom orders of the globe map from other clients, including ones for Air France-KLM with the complete route networks of all their partners, and another from National Geographic Benelux and the City of Amsterdam, with a map of the city projected onto the globe.”
Also eye-catching, but for a completely different reason, were a series of simple basemaps created for Buienradar, the most popular Dutch weather website, and app. Millions of people have seen Hans’s maps when they checked the weather.
In the early years of Red Geographics, Hans became involved with the Cartotalk forum, first as an enthusiastic user, later on as a moderator, and finally an admin. Through Cartotalk, he also got involved with NACIS, the North American Cartographic Information Society. He attended their meeting in Salt Lake City in 2005 and he’s been to every meeting since. When NACIS took over Cartotalk, Hans became an ex-officio board member for several years before being formally elected a board member at large. He still serves on the board to this day and is currently in his 2nd term as secretary. Through NACIS, Hans was able to expand his network of international contacts, allowing him to contribute to several large-scale mapping and atlas projects. He created island maps that can be found in the Millennium House “Earth” atlas and more recently, several full-page maps for the 11th Edition National Geographic World Atlas released in 2019.
Building on the success of his earlier globe projects, Hans then created a new map whose design is displayed prominently on a new product called BalancePlanet, a globe-themed, fully functional yoga-ball that Hans considers a spiritual successor to the Oolaalaa globe bean bag chair.
In 2019, Hans expanded his team, adding two members to become a team of three. With more resources now available, Hans and his team can now tackle larger, more complex (mapping) projects. His team took on the momentous task of producing a nationwide 1:20,000 scale topographic base map of the entire country of Luxembourg. The finished results were used as a cartographic base for tourist maps showing hiking and cycling routes all over the country.
“The Avenza products have been a major factor in my development as a cartographer, as well as the development of my company,” says Hans. Many of his projects use a combination of FME and MAPublisher, and Hans has utilized the interoperability between these two programs to implement significant workflow automation. With a single base dataset, multiple maps can be made with the same style, and automating this process means he can produce a high volume of maps in just seconds, without needing to manually configure shared thematic elements.
“With automating some of the map production processes, I now only have to focus on the parts where my cartographic skills are most needed. MAPublisher allows me to do that. I want to find the right balance between quality and speed when it comes to producing maps, and with automating the data processes I have found just that.”
Aside from the traditional mapping products Hans has become known for, he enjoys working on smaller projects with interesting stories around them. “The maps I get the most joy out of these days are, interestingly enough, not those big ones. Over the past ten years or so I’ve been asked to produce greyscale maps for several academic publications, a lot of them focusing on the Arctic and Antarctic regions. Limited in terms of visual variables and often a need to show a lot of information on a small surface area, these kinds of maps are a very interesting challenge. One thing led to another, word-of-mouth is a great promotion tool, and we now find ourselves in the middle of producing about 30 maps for an upcoming publication by Cambridge University Press, chronicling the state of research in those areas. Wonderfully esoteric subjects which often lead me down a Wikipedia rabbit hole!”
Hans continues to use his cartography skill set to explore new ways of making maps more prominent in everyday life. Hans began introducing his colleague, Inge van Daelen, to the concepts of satellite imagery and Photoshop (using Tom Patterson’s great tutorial on how to process Landsat data). Branching off of this, they founded Blue Geographics, which originally started as a fun side-project but quickly grew into a full-fledged business. Through Blue Geographics, Hans designs and produces a range of sportswear and lifestyle items displaying beautiful satellite images derived from Landsat and Sentinel data.
“Looking ahead, I just want to make beautiful things,” says Hans, “One of my hobbies is photography, specifically cycling and cosplay. A few years ago, when I did a photoshoot with two cosplayers, I saw a sticker with that text in their workshop and it struck a chord with me. I’ve long had ‘doing awesome work for people I like’ as one of my goals and I want to keep on doing that. I also want to keep on challenging myself by trying out new techniques and new ways to map things. There’s still a lot to learn and I am very happy to know a lot of people in the cartographic community who are happy to share their knowledge and experiences.”
Toronto, ON, April 27th, 2021 – Avenza Systems Inc., producers of the Avenza Maps® app for mobile devices and geospatial plugins for Adobe Creative Cloud®, including Geographic Imager® for Adobe Photoshop®, is pleased to announce the release of MAPublisher® 10.8 for Adobe Illustrator®. This latest version provides user interface and usability enhancements for several tools, an updated coordinate systems library, raster ECW format support, and other mapping engine enhancements.
MAPublisher cartography software seamlessly integrates more than seventy GIS mapping tools into Adobe Illustrator to help you create beautiful maps from GIS data. Import industry-standard GIS data formats and make crisp, clean maps with all attributes and georeferencing intact using the Adobe Illustrator design environment.
New features of the MAPublisher 10.8 plugin for Adobe Illustrator include:
User Interface and Tool Improvements:
Multi-select attribute columns to batch modify attribute properties
Line Plotter allows multi-select MAP locations
MAP Themes now includes overprint options
Document Summary panels will now provide MAPublisher “last saved with” version information
Scale Bar, Create Legend, and Elevation Profile preview panel can now display background colours
Raster ECW Support: Import and work with Enhanced Compression Wavelet files
Updated Coordinate Systems: Engine enhancements including an updated coordinate system library
MAPublisher 10.8 is immediately available free of charge to all current MAPublisher users with active maintenance and as an upgrade for non-maintenance users starting at US$649. New licenses are available from US$1499. MAPublisher FME-Auto and MAPublisher LabelPro are also available as add-ons starting at US$499. Academic, floating, and volume licences are also available. Prices include one year of full maintenance. Read more about MAPublisher 10.8 in our release blog, or visit www.avenza.com/mapublisher for more details.
More about Avenza Systems Inc.
Avenza Systems Inc. is an award-winning, privately held corporation that provides cartographers and GIS professionals with powerful software tools to make better maps. Avenza also offers the mobile Avenza Maps app to sell, purchase, distribute, and use maps on iOS and Android devices. For more information, visit www.avenza.com.
We are happy to announce that MAPublisher 10.8, the latest update to the MAPublisher plug-in for Adobe Illustrator, is now available. With this release, we are excited to bring forward new usability enhancements for several MAPublisher tools. We are also thrilled to confirm that MAPublisher now supports raster files in the enhanced compression wavelet (ECW) format. Alongside these enhancements, we have also implemented improvements and added expanded support to our coordinate system library.
Here is what you can expect with the latest MAPublisher 10.8 release:
Usability Improvements for MAPublisher Tools
The Avenza team is always working to improve the capabilities of our vast suite of cartography tools. We work with our users to implement improvements to our tool catalog that truly meet the needs of actual mapping professionals. In this release we are introducing several enhancements to some of our existing tools:
Multi-Column selections in the Attribute Table Editing Schema
In the early versions of MAPublisher 10, we added the ability to select multiple columns within the Edit Schema window of the MAP attributes panel, allowing users to toggle visibility settings on multiple attribute columns at the same time. Now with 10.8, we are delighted to build on this by implementing the ability to configure data properties across multiple selected attribute columns. Users can not only toggle visibility or remove multiple attribute columns at once, but can now also edit default values, attribute size, and read-only settings for all selected values. Additionally, users can now change the data type (i.e string, integer, boolean, etc) for multiple selected attribute columns all at once, as long as each column shares the same starting data type.
Select and add multiple MAP Locations in Line Plotter
We continue to bring improvements to the Line Plotter tool, this time by introducing the ability to select multiple MAP locations and add them to the line vertices (node) list. For users familiar with the Point-by-point plotting method in Line Plotter, this will be especially useful for adding a large collection of sequential MAP locations, as previously each point needed to be entered one at a time.
Document Summary Panel now includes “Last Saved with” Version Info
For users working with MAPublisher projects across different versions of the software, you will be delighted to know that the document summary dialogue now includes information indicating the version of MAPublisher the project was last saved with. This information will help users that frequently share MAPublisher projects with colleagues, allowing them to better establish version standards across collaborative projects.
Overprint Options in MAP Themes
Previous versions of MAPublisher required a user to navigate the Illustrator attributes panel to configure overprint options for each map element individually and refer to these options separately using MAP Themes. Now with MAPublisher 10.8, an overprint option has been implemented directly within the MAP Themes panel, allowing users to configure overprint settings for fills and strokes within each stylesheet in the MAP Themes tool.
Scale bar, Create Legend, and Elevation Profile tool previews with Background Colours
We have added a small improvement to the scale bar, create legend, and elevation profile tool panel. The preview window for these tools, which allows users to adjust and edit their visual properties before adding them to the map, now has the option to configure a preview background colour. This option is helpful when configuring light, or white-coloured map elements which were previously difficult to see against the default white preview background.
Support for Raster ECW file formats
New to MAPublisher 10.8, we now include Enhanced Compression Wavelet raster files to our growing lists of supported data formats. Users can now import and work with ECW files directly within the MAPublisher environment of Adobe Illustrator, all while retaining necessary spatial integrity, and without needing to convert your data.
Engine Improvements and Updated Coordinate system catalogue
We are working continuously to improve the back-end MAPublisher engine to ensure our users can continue their work in an optimized, seamless, design-focused cartographic environment. Along with improvements to our engine and bug fixes, we have built on our current coordinate system catalogue with updates to the coordinate system and projection library. This means our list of supported projections has grown, with new additions including the Natural Earth and Natural Earth 2 Projections created by Tom Patterson. For a full list of our expanded coordinate systems library please check the projections guide in the Avenza Support center.
MAPublisher 10.8 is immediately available today, free of charge to all current MAPublisher users with active maintenance subscriptions and as an upgrade for non-maintenance users.
Find out more at the Avenza User Conference!
Want to learn more about MAPublisher? Want to see how industry professionals are using Avenza Products in their organizations? Join us on May 12th, 11am – 5pm (EST) for the first-ever Avenza User Conference. Registration is Free!
The event will feature a full day of speaker presentations from the Mapping and Geospatial communities. The Avenza Product teams will also be on hand to answer questions and give you a sneak peek of upcoming developments to the Avenza Platform. Sign up for free at avenza.com/user-conference