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Hello.  Noob here with some stupid questions.  I'm trying to create my first map using Dan's instructions.  First off, what's the advantage of doing this very time-consuming process with all its steps versus just going to various websites and downloading a topo of the area you need?  Is the resultant map somehow better?  Why not just download USGS quads, for example?

I am going to be using the free DEM2TOPO versus the $399 Global Mapper.  The first thing I did wrong is going to the National Map Viewer to download the elevation data.  I downloaded one 24k quad and, 365MB's later discovered that there is no tiff file to use with DEM2TOPO.  BTW, this download, which consisted of elevation data only, actually was more than 700MB of info unzipped.  Why so huge?  So if my state had 100 quads in it, that would take 70GB of information?  Wow.  I've downloaded 24k quads in pdf format and they were only about 30MB in size.  Anyway, if you are using DEM2TOPO how to you obtain the required file in tiff format?  As far as I can tell, you can't get it from TNMV and although the instructions under "Dem2Topo" say, "Make sure you used the USGS DEM LINK (GeoTiff) for Dem2Topo," above it says that "the seamless server is no longer operational."  Wha?

Any help, please?