A few weeks ago I was approached by buienradar.nl, a popular Dutch weather website, to redo the base map for their website.

This is the standard map background that they project the realtime rainfall data on. Style-wise I was limited to their color usage, but my updated version features rivers and the borders are much improved. Also, thanks to Derek Tonn’s Graphics Optimization I managed to shave a few kilobytes off the total filesize without making any concessions to the overall look of the map. Given that buienradar receives millions of hits per day, this saves an awful lot of bandwidth and energy.

In all, I am very proud I got to work on this map. Now let’s hope nobody will blame me for the bad weather here

The 2009 NACIS conference is behind us already, so it’s time to look back. As always, it was a wonderful gathering of cartographers and other map-minded people. Interesting presentations, fun social events, you name it.

Some things that stood out to me were the work that Axis Maps is doing on Indiemapper. It looks like this may be the way cartography and GIS apps will be moving in the future. Away from the desktop and on to the Internet. I haven’t been able to play with it myself yet, but I’d like to give it a spin as soon as I can. It outputs to SVG so the results can be edited in Illustrator.

Another highlight was Elbie Bentley’s presentation on a narrative atlas she produced. This mapped out the progress of a mapping party for the Pacific Railroad and she faithfully recreated the visual style of the 1800s maps, including manually hachuring 20 map sheets. Of all the people currently alive, she may just be the one who knows most about hachuring now.

On a personal level, the panel discussion that I organised on running a cartographic business was very well received. Together with 3 co-panelists (Derek Tonn of mapformation, Dennis McClendon of Chicago Cartographics and Alex Tait of International Mapping) we sat down and answered questions from the audience for an hour and a half. Large audience and we filled up the entire time slot we had, plus many people came to us afterwards with additional questions. Stay tuned because I want to do/write more on this subject.

This year’s Practical Cartography Day at the NACIS conference in Sacramento, California, was quite interesting. The three presentations that I personally thought were the most useful were, in no particular order:

• Tom Patterson and Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso who were speaking of the upcoming Natural Earth Vector dataset. I like this one a lot because I was one of the volunteers who worked on it, but also because in the past I’ve had to deal with the issues of combining datasets with differing accuracies and levels of generalisation.
• Jill Saligoe-Simmel of Mapdiva was speaking about Ortelius, desktop mapping software specifically for Mac and designed by cartographers. I’m not sure whether I’ll be making much use of it myself, seeing how much energy I’ve invested in learning Illustrator and MAPublisher, but some of its features are just pure genius. The Linear Select feature, to insert a bridge on a road, is a prime example of that.
• David Heyman of Axis Maps did a presentation on their online map tool Indiemapper, which even takes away the need to have software installed on a local machine. Very interesting work and I can’t wait to give that a try myself.

As usual there is a poster session with a number of very cool map designs, great to browse through and talk to the cartographers.

It’s taken a long time (months of recording as well as preparing a EULA and having DVDs printed), but finally they’re ready to be released: my MAPublisher training videos.

It’s 5+ hours of instruction covering all of MAPublisher, comparable to a 2-day hands-on training course, along with all necessary source data on DVD and they’re available right now, either through my company, Red Geographics, or through resellers such as Avenza in Canada and Screen + Paper in Germany.

The videos are spoken in English and use an English version of Adobe Illustrator, on a Mac.

I’m very glad they finally see the light of day. All in all the project has taken much longer than I anticipated (recording the instructions took a surprisingly huge amount of time, it’s very easy to fumble words or mis-click somewhere…)

Just a quick post to share the news that today marks the 5th anniversary of Red Geographics, my company. I am of course very pleased with reaching this milestone and would like to thank my family, friends, suppliers and of course clients. Without them this would not have been possible.

Recently I got to work, as a subcontractor, on a street map for a US educational institution. My task was to label street centerlines, using MAPublisher and LabelPro. This was my first real project using LabelPro so this would be a good test case.

I loaded up the road centerline data, which was not classified by type, and set up some rules for this. Using 9 pt Helvetica Neue, 55 Roman, as font.

When I examined the results of this first run, I noticed that it seemed to be very “leader line happy”. I have not shown the unplaced labels in this particular sample (for the sake of the argument that I’m trying to make, they don’t really matter that much anyway).

It quickly became obvious that if I’d want the best results out of LabelPro, I would have to prepare my data. a “one set of rules fits all” approach clearly wasn’t going to work. I decided to split my data into 4 different categories.
These categories are then each set up with a different set of rules, so that I can more accurately influence the way they’re being labelled.

• Interstate – There’s one interstate running through this area. Its segments have a road name, which basically is the interstate number. I simply don’t label this one at all, instead I will be manually placing an interstate shield later on. Note that I can do this with LabelPro as well, but since there’s only one,  it would take more time to set up the rules for it than it would to manually place 2 or 3 shields. So I manually select the interstate and its on- and offramps and put them on a new layer.
• Major roads – There’s several major roads present. I want to make sure they’re labelled the clearest, with the highest priority. So again it’s manual selection and putting them on a new layer. This one gets labelled with a higher initial font size and no leader lines.
• Regular streets – No leader lines either, plus I’m going with a condensed font rather than the regular roman version. Unfortunately you can not instruct LabelPro to try and mix both versions of a font.
• Short streets – Selecting on the Length attribute that MAPublisher automatically generates allows me to seperate the short streets from the regular ones and set them up with a different set of rules. Again a condensed font, but it’s even smaller than the regular streets and now leader lines are allowed. Hopefully this will reduce the amount of leader lines cluttering up the map. I’ve set the treshold for short roads at 400 feet.

The rulesets I created for these layers are as follows:
Major roads:

Regular roads:

Short roads:

The main LabelPro interface, where I’ve specified the priorities and fonts to be used, looks like this:

Finally, the result that we’ve all been waiting for. As you can see, there still is a need for some manual editing, but the overall image is a lot less cluttered than the first run. I did change the color for the streets for legibility. Instead of 100% black it’s now only 75%.

Reducing the number of roads where leader lines are a valid option makes for a much clearer result. In retrospect, I think I might even want to limit it to dead-end streets and cul-de-sacs.

I think it’s important to keep in mind that LabelPro is a tool, not a magic box that’ll deliver perfect cartographic text placement. Even with the manual editing that’s necessary to make this map look finished, it’s still saving me a lot of time. Also, since the label text is taken directly from the attributes, there’s less chance of typos or other mistakes (assuming the source data is good of course). Of course the rules you have to set are very much influenced by the local topography and what I’ve done here may not apply to your maps. Still, it pays to experiment.

Interesting conversation in the elevator yesterday… I had picked up the Times Comprehensive atlas at a bookstore and was obviously quite happy with it (it is, after all, a great example of cartography). When I stepped into an elevator somebody noticed the €179 price tag and asked if I had actually paid for it. My response was “of course”.I guess he thought it was too much (then again, what is too much? A tiny satnav device is still more expensive…)

Even though free maps and data are becoming more and more prevalent these days, I have absolutely no problem with paying money for good maps, and I would take those over Google or Bing maps any time.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that a good atlas is something that should be in every home or office.

Ever since Tom Patterson started offering Natural Earth, a public domain raster dataset of the entire Earth, I’ve been a big fan of it. In fact, the base layer for the Oolaalaa globes is based on Natural Earth I (with added bathymetry and increased contrast).

After releasing 3 raster datasets this way, Tom has recently teamed up with Nathaniel V. Kelso to create a vector product that also will be released into the public domain: Natural Earth Vector. Nathaniel has invited me to participate in this as well, and to be honest I think it’s a wonderful project. So far I’ve been involved in extracting road data from OpenStreetmap and identifying rivers in Europe.

Processing the OpenStreetmap data, using FME, reinforced my slight aversion of XML/GML based data. When downloading the data, you have the option of getting the .osm data, which is in an XML format, or shapefiles. FME does support the .osm format, but processing the files takes a terrible amount of time. Processing the shapefiles for Europe, Asia, Oceania, Africa and South America, just filtering out the major highways, takes about 11 minutes. I don’t dare to do that with the .osm data, but I fear it may take days. It’s nice that XML is so open and free, but for large amounts of data it’s simply unsuitable.

Anyway, to get back to Natural Earth Vector, it will be officially unveiled at the NACIS conference in Sacramento this october and I for one am looking very much forward to that.

So for a long time I’ve been saying I generally don’t use FME for raster work because it’s slow. This was all based on some bad experiences way back with FME 2006 (the first version to support raster data if I recall correctly) and the infamous 37-Gigabyte temporary file that was left on my hard drive after a mosaicking operation crashed. So I’d mostly been using FME for dynamically making a clip out of a larger raster file, which I would invariably produce with Global Mapper.

Recently, Dale Lutz of Safe Software had suggested that I’d give FME another chance, because they had made a lot of progress in the handling of raster data. So I decided to give it another go, pitting the FME 2010 “UC” beta against Global Mapper 10.02.All tests were done in Windows Vista x64 running through Bootcamp on my Mac Pro with 10 Gb of ram. All data was present on the local hard drive.

Test 1 : tiling a raster

I took a TIFF file of Tom Patterson’s Natural Earth. Specifially, I had already produced a combined version. Tom offers it in “west” and “east” files, I put those together to get the entire earth in a single, almost 2 Gb, GeoTIFF. I set up both FME and Global Mapper to tile this file into 90 x 90 degree chunks and output each of them as GeoTIFF. FME blazed through this in a mere 32 seconds. Global Mapper took close to 18 minutes.

Test 2 : mosaicking the tiles back to an ECW

Another common procedure, mosaicking a number of raster tiles and creating a single large image out of them. I did try to set the compression factor in both FME and Global Mapper to the same value but since they specify them in different ways, it’s difficult. I got close, but not quite. In any case, compression generally isn’t going to give very nice results on map images, where you often have areas with solid colors. Also, I did struggle a bit with FME to get it to deal with the raster bands (the alpha channel) in the GeoTIFF’s correctly. Still, I only measured actual processing time, not how much time it took me to set it up (which, to be honest, is roughly the same in both FME and Global Mapper). I fed both applications their own tiles that were output in test 1. FME got through this in about 1:30, Global Mapper took 3:30

Final verdict

Easy one really, FME took a combined total of 2 minutes of processing, against 21 minutes for Global Mapper. Need I say more?

I do think the two products each have their unique strengths though, so I will certainly not stop using Global Mapper. But I will use FME much more often for this kind of work.

Interesting news over at Cartotalk this morning. It appears the Earth Atlas, published by Millennium House, has won a prestigious award.

Start of Press Release from the Galley Club

GALLEY CLUB AWARDS 2009
The winners of the 2009 Galley Club Awards have been announced.

The awards, in their 33rd year, celebrate excellence in book and magazine production. The ceremony was held on Friday 19 June at Darling Harbour, Sydney, and was hosted by comedian James O’Loughlin. Around 150 industry professionals were in attendance. Book of the Year went to Earth, published by Millennium House. The full list of recipients can be viewed at the Galley Club website, www.galleyclub.com.au.

End of Press Release.

As I was one of the cartographers involved on this project, I did 80+ maps of islands around Africa, South America and in the Pacific Ocean, I am of course very pleased to see this absolutely wonderful atlas win an award. It’s been a fun project to work on and the end result is looking absolutely stunning:

Canary Islands map from Earth (© Millennium House)

I’ve got some more sample images, as well as a photo of the full-size atlas, over on my main Red Geographics website.