We’ve been busy behind the scenes to add a new series of maps to One Stop Map: MAPublisher-editable maps! Starting off with the individual country maps in Defined style we are going to be adding a lot of these in the coming times.
MAPublisher, developed by Avenza, is a cartographic plug-in for Adobe Illustrator that allows you to work with GIS data within the graphics environment. It is used by a lot of cartographic companies and organisations, such as National Geographic, the USGS, the New York Times, but also One Stop Map! In fact, of our close partners Red Geographics is the Benelux reseller for MAPublisher.
Working with MAPublisher gives you a number of benefits. Because it’s providing a link between the GIS world and the graphics world you get the best of both of them. This means you are working with your map at scale, and in a projection, and all objects in the map still know what they are. That means they’re fully attributed, depending on the source data. So a city point, for example, will have an attribute saying whether it’s a capital city or not so you can use that to style the point.If you want to add your own GIS data to the map, for example a GPX file of a bike trip you’ve done, you have that option and it will import to the correct location right away, no need to tweak anything.Aside from all that you still have all of the graphical design options that Illustrator gives you, making this really the best of both worlds!
All of the MAPublisher maps we sell at the moment are produced using Open Data, specifically the Natural Earth dataset. This is a beautiful, cartographic, dataset that’s intended for small scale overview maps. They come with a MAPublisher Map View, allowing you to import your own data, and MAP Stylesheets that have been used to style the map as it is.
In order to get the maximum benefit out of these maps you need to have a license of MAPublisher. If you don’t have one you can contact Avenza to purchase one. Also make sure you doublecheck what version of MAPublisher is needed to open the map (as old versions can’t open files created by newer versions).
We’re starting out with the individual country maps and will be adding to this list all the time. You can always see which maps are available in MAPublisher format here. If there is a map that we haven’t converted yet but you really want it, feel free to get in touch with us so we can help you out.
