A Cartography Nerd's Guide to Custom Map-Making | Hacker News Reader

A Cartography Nerd's Guide to Custom Map-Making

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197 pointsdcschelt31 comments

QGIS is an incredible success of the FOSS world.

Its probably mostly down to the ridiculous pricing demands of the other GIS providers (primarly ESRI, but also MapInfo and others). But it gives hope for us FOSS supporters.

Who knows - maybe one day the industry standard may shift from others like Adobe CS also?

QGIS is incredible. I have two geography degrees and all they taught us was ESRI stuff. One class with GRASS and QGIS, 7 years of ArcGIS. Only when I graduated and no longer had access to their insanely expensive licenses that I rediscovered QGIS. Because it's not the smoothest ux, it really pushed me towards the programmatic API. As a result I became a better GIS expert than I ever would have. I do robotics + GIS these days and QGIS is front and centre in my toolbox.

I don’t know if it progresses to the point of kickbacks often, but ESRI heavily promotes their projects in education in order to lock students into their ecosystem as early as possible.

Just like Microsoft or Autodesk

Also Inkscape is another incredible open source success, though the OP used Illustrator, some one with similar tasks could have easily utilized Inkscape at zero cost.

Add scribus to that list as well. And Darktable. Immensely useful things.

For those who want to take a deep dive and learn about cartography, Esri has a fantastic, free MOOC running at the moment and it's not too late to register. It uses ArcGIS Pro ($$$) but you get a free license for the duration of the course. Personal licenses are affordable after that if you want to keep going.

http://www.esri.com/mooc

Full disclosure: I work at Esri. I'm new to cartography myself, and I've been promoting the MOOC internally because it really is awesome (in my humble opinion).

How hard would it be to follow the course using QGIS? Is it about the principles, or specific ArcGIS features? I haven't found as good courses in QGIS, but I have no interest in learning ArcGIS

Probably pretty hard, unfortunately. The course teaches cartographic principles, but it does so using ArcGIS pro.

You could try doing the activity in Pro and QGIS in parallel; that way you'd learn both.

That being said, I'm a very hands-on learner so I get the most benefit from the activities; you may find the videos/quizzes/discussions valuable regardless.

I am no fan of ESRI, but if you are serious about map cartography in the long run as part of your career you should probably learn ArcGIS. In almost every way QGIS either matches or exceeds ArcGIS (discounting the hideously expensive extensions) except for cartography. The out of the box cartographic tools in ArcGIS remain unrivaled.

Most serious cartographers (NatGeo, NYTimes, etc.) that I know of will do line work and maybe some/all labeling in GIS and then export the vectors to Photoshop/Illustrator for the finishing.

Which specific tools or features are you referring to?

Specifically the labeling engine is very nice, but the other tools listed here are quite valuable as well: http://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/tool-reference/cartography/...

Doesn't the SVG output from QGIS suffice then?

Yes, this is actually what I recommend to people not already locked into the ESRI ecosystem. Render vectors in QGIS and then do all coloring etc in Illustrator.

ESRI's stuff does give you a bit of an advantage on the start in that their labeling for instance will probably look nicer out of the box but since you're already no longer in turnkey solution domain for your map because you are taking it to Illustrator that's something that isn't too big of a deal in the long run.

I used to work at ESRI, too. Nevertheless, I hope you realize that recommending ArcGIS in this context is analogous to somebody doing a blog post on PostgreSQL and you recommend people try Oracle, too. And then, somebody mentions that there is an "Oracle Express" version that is free (or really cheap). In fact, the Oracle pricing structure is too similar to ArcGIS to ignore this comparison.

Wow! Thanks for the tip about QGIS. I have a degree in Geography and I got really good at ArcGIS in school but haven't touched it since because I didn't own a (reaaaaally expensive) license for it. I tried QGIS out just now and I'm totally blown away. I'm building a map of public lands in Utah for an off-road trip that I'm taking in a few weeks. I've never touched this software in my life but it only took a shapefile downloaded from the State of Utah GIS folks and about 20 minutes to make something pretty with QGIS:

https://i.imgur.com/P6zZjCJ.jpg?1

I did all of this from my ThinkPad running Arch Linux and with a HiDPI display. Everything just worked out-of-the-box and looks beautiful. Awesome!

> But this is 2018, and in order to be useful, the map also needed some connection back to the digital world. I added GPS coordinates and a clickable URL link to a Google Maps location for each tennis court.

I was expecting this would be a QR code, so the print version still has "some connection back to the digital world"

QR coordinate data should be pretty easy, right?

> What I was looking for here was something called a Shapefile, a geospatial data format that nerdy geographers use.

Nerds use better formats than shapefiles. GeoJSON, GeoPackage, spatialite, ... those are nerdy.

> Next up was the laborious process of determining which bus lines one could actually take to each tennis court. My approach was 100% analog, starting from the top of the alphabetical list of tennis courts (Alamo Square) and marching straight through to the end (Youngblood Coleman), noting all of the bus lines that had a stop within reasonable walking distance to a court.

As a cartography nerd myself I was surprised just one comment suggested using GIS and geospatial analysis to match bus lines to tennis courts. Actually this very analysis could be made via services that provide a visual interface such as Mapbox or CARTO.

I recommend watching this documentary where Roger Tomlinson ("father of GIS") is highlighted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VLGvWEuZxI

For those interested in learning to create maps on the web and visualize geospatial data CARTO also has a free MOOC site https://carto.com/academy/

Disclosure: I used to work at CARTO

For matching bus lines they could have use openstreetmap data and what GIS is meant for: spatial analysis! Find nearest N stops around each court.

The other thing you'll want for custom map making is OpenStreetMap.

Interesting how much time and effort was spent on something that looks great but uses such a fantastically imprecise icon for the actual thing it's mapping. Is the bottom of the handle the "point" where the court actually is?

Looks to me like it's using the center of the whole icon (somewhere near the top of the handle). Which is even more terrible than your guess.

He had the tennis ball option staring at him in the face. C'mon man.

Because precision is relative and in this case, with such an 'artsy' map, it does not matter that much.

I made a map of the Taiwanese train network using my own implmentation of Logo. The distance between each station corresponds to the time it takes a local train to travel that leg.

http://peterburk.github.io/tra/

I tried printing it and posting it on various train station platforms, but it always got taken down within a week. I gave copies to station staff, who never contacted me. My conclusion was that although design is fun, it's better to do the marketing first, before making the product.

For those interested, IDEO's CEO, Tim Brown, has written an interesting book entitled "Change by Design".

And also a great article, which is shortened version of a book

https://hbr.org/2015/09/design-for-action

"I strongly recommend GQIS."

Was that a typo?

Nice project, but I wonder why a Google map was chosen over Openstreetmaps.

> I could manipulate the data file in ArcGIS or QGIS, two enormously powerful pieces of cartography software. For anyone looking to get into amateur cartography, I strongly recommend GQIS. It works on a Mac (which ArcGIS doesn’t) and its cost (zero dollars!) outweighs its bugginess.

Of course it is, but I think you already know that.

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