Messages

Congratulations Boyd - you've just earned yourself a printed copy of my map! Once it's ready that is...   

Thanks for the explanation of the digital zoom levels.  What does stand out to me is the 1:72, 1:144 etc.  I guess Google are talking 1:72dpi here? That would make sense to me, but the ,223.822090 following i'll just put down to either very logical, or very clever math.  When the time comes, i think i'll just follow that lead and see how it looks on various devices, then i will go for a 1:25k for a printed copy as i'm in Australia.

I'm trying my best not to bombard you with questions, but at this stage you guys are my only contact with the map making world so please excuse me if i get a little carried away at times.

Do you have any maps uploaded to this site that I could download and take a look at on my phone/ipad?  Also I don't suppose you've created an app before?  Yes, i'm getting that far ahead of myself already.  Gotta love a challenge...

Cheers,
Avon

[at this stage]

Sorry for the slow reply guys, but thank you so much!

Jolly Roger - your info has been filed for a later date.  I know it's juicy but is far over my head at this stage.  Please don't hold back though.  You now have me thinking about an app as this was originally a print only project.

And Boyd what can i say... THANK YOU SO MUCH for your help and time with this!  Such incredible info.  My better half says I owe you one and i think she's right.  I'll definitely be hanging around for a while as my new 'obsession' isn't allowing me to think about much else at this stage. 

However think i may have peaked a bit too early as i'm still missing some data that, which i actually thought was going to be the easiest to acquire eg. towns and cities! After several crappy data sets i managed to merge a .csv file containing census and locality info, only to find the location data isn't accurate.  Killing me...

Anyway this site has got me this far so i'm going to continue to treat everything i learn for now as gospel. 

BTW my maps are looking a hell of a lot nicer due to me taking some 'hints' from USGS link.

Cheers,
Avon   

[Eg.]

First of all thanks to everyone who offered help and advice.  I'm happy to report that it seems as though i'm making a map that will not only look kinda cool, but should work too!

However now that I'm becoming a bit more familiar with QGIS, I wonder if there may be some industry standards that are better thought out than my "that looks kinda cool" technique.

Eg.
Hwy/Road/track/river/creek line thickness
Label text sizes in relation to city towns, roads, waterways, forests, lakes, areas of interest, etc

Also
When/how to make these roads, waterways, or areas of interest visible at particular zoom levels.  Is this a matter of keeping your map looking clean or is there more of a 'science' to it?

And finally
I feel as though i'd like to view just a symbol when zoomed out (a train station for example) but then make the label appear as i zoom in.  I thought i could achieve this by duplicating the layer, but that makes me wonder if the "pro's" would want to keep the least amount of layers possible, which got me thinking about...

Industry Standards 

I'm particularly interested in peoples views in relation to my map (a 10m topo to be printed) but would also love to hear opinions about online/offline, even raster resolutions etc.

Cheers,
Avon

Thanks again Boyd - VERY juicy info re. deleting records and/or changing sort order.  I'm glad you warned me.

I have a bunch of older raster maps which i'd like to join then trace the relevant historical features in order to create a new vector layer.  I expect it to take a while, but think it will be worth the effort.  I've only just started playing around in QGIS tonight and it looks promising.

If you say GlobalMapper has a 'raster to poly' type function i'll definitely give that a good look as any option to speed up the process would definitely be worth while.

EDIT: Googling "Digitizing Map Data" will turned up some really good tracing tutorials for QGIS.  Looks like the fun part is over - now i just need to put in the hours.

Excellent - great to know i'm on the right track!

I've been downloading 'vector' spatial data which happen to be ESRI shapefiles, which I now realise contain semi-populated .dbf files! This is definitely what i'm looking for.

However at this stage it seems as though i may have to 'reverse engineer' a vector layer from a bunch of raster files.  Is there a recommended workflow/software for that? 

As if i don't have enough homework from this thread already... 

Hello guys - thank you SO MUCH for the info. 

Being new to all of this it took me a while to get up to speed with everything mentioned, as well as the raster vs vector debate.

Purely from a design point of view... Wouldn't I be better off keeping as much of the data in vector for as long as possible, until i HAVE to rasterize it for my chosen output? 

Also, now that you have me thinking more about my final product, i'd like to print everything (including elevation) in vector, but for my offline maps i'd like to have satellite imagery as an optional overlay, which i guess forces me to use some sort of tiling app?  In the past i used MBTiles which worked fairly well, but i haven't used any the others mentioned in this thread so will definitely doing my homework.

Thanks again to everyone for taking the time to respond.

Thanks so much Dan - amazing advice!

I'm sure i'll have some more questions down there track, but for now i'm very grateful that i have an overview of the whole process. The last thing i wanted to do is head off 'experimenting' again only to find that i'm working in the wrong software or with the wrong files.

My hat definitely goes off to you guys.  I thought i was fairly computer savvy until i discovered your crazily complex world.  Wow...   

Hi guys, I'm incredibly new to all of this so please go easy!

First of all, a huge thank you to the folks responsible for the How to Create Garmin Topo's walk through.  It's the reason why i've signed up - i'd be in a world of hurt without your help.

So my goal is not necessarily to upload my maps to a Garmin device, but to (hopefully) print them into books and make them available as offline maps for phones and tablets. I'm particularly interested in creating maps (prettied up by yours truly) which mark historical areas within my state in Australia.

I've been busy downloading the relevant Spacial Data and have even spoken to the appropriate 'authorities' about copyright concerns, which there is no issue.  So my question is, is the Garmin Topo workflow the best bet for me?  As a graphic artist I like the idea of holding onto shape files for as long as possible, so should i convert to polish?

Any tips or advice will be greatly appreciated.  I had a (somewhat successful) attempt using TileMill on the Mac a couple of years back, but thought this is a more 'professional' option?  As i said i'm only VERY new so please go easy!! 

Cheers,
Avon