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Comment by nxc18 | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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