6 replies to this topic

[frax]

You, who are already on nine point one, any (exciting) news for us cartographers, and any changes (improvements?) in the Illustrator export?

(I know, I could look it up in the list of changes, but it is also good to hear things from people who use it practically)

[vandalmax]

I've been on 9.1 for a couple of weeks now and I haven't noticed any really useful changes. I export to Corel Draw though, so I don't know about Illustrator.

The most impressive change has been that the processing time is now reported in with hours and minutes, instead of just seconds. It's nice to know that ESRI learned how to divide by sixty.

[Martin Gamache]

Frax,

Some potentially useful tools have been added to the Toolbox but I have not had a chance to test them yet. Not sure what even needs to be added to the Illustrator export...IMO it seems fairly complete. I dont know that it well ever handle transparencies and pattern well and I prefer to build that stuff native in Illustrator if I am going to use it since there are alot more options there. The biggest change for me was when they added a CMYK export option and I didnt have to deal with the big color shifts but that happened a while ago.

mg

[melon_mapper]

I have been using 9.1 for the past 3 months. The biggest cartographic enhancement is the maplex labeling engine. It does a really good job readjusting the labels.

Some thing I have learned bring data into Illustrator- When you get the dialog box to update legacy type(since arc saves it as an Illustrator 3 version)- I always update. Then when the file does open up the first thing I do is select all and then use an arrow key-press once and the type is ok and very editable. If you use maplex and it stacks the type each row will be its own not part of the the other rows of type.

John

[Themarko]

I made the switch from 3.3 straight to 9.1, skipping all the version in between. So I can't really compare it to 9.0 or 8.x but it does have a lot of nice features that makes my life easier. Nearly everything is editable, lots of nice tools, etc. I do sometimes have a problem where it just crashes without warning and work is lost. Naturally that is pretty frustrating. It does import well into Illustrator. I also think it's more user friendly to the non-GIS people. I recently taught a class in it and they picked it up much quicker than 3.3,but then perhaps their overall computer skills were better to begin with.

Mark

[mike]

ArcGIS 9.2 will have more features and a few more cartographic tools to help improve the map creation process.

http://www.direction...?article_id=927

[frax]

cool,
thanks for the comments!

We'll see when my update arrives (it has to pass through Africa due to obscure licensing requirements, my licenses are provided through Nairobi)