7 replies to this topic

[Kevin McManigal]

OK folks,

I have been trying this all day with sparse documentation, having no luck. I have a FH vector with no spatial reference. I know it was traced from a USGS map, UTM, NAD 27, with a scale of 250,000. I know the lat/long of a few points on the map, such as cities and peak summits.

How do I georeference it, and then export the point, line, and area features out as shp files for Arc?

Thanks in advance to the gurus!

Kevin

[Hans van der Maarel]

OK folks,

I have been trying this all day with sparse documentation, having no luck. I have a FH vector with no spatial reference. I know it was traced from a USGS map, UTM, NAD 27, with a scale of 250,000. I know the lat/long of a few points on the map, such as cities and peak summits.

How do I georeference it, and then export the point, line, and area features out as shp files for Arc?

Thanks in advance to the gurus!

Import a GIS file in that projection/scale as a new layer. Line up your existing map to that, then copy the georeference and export the layers. I don't have a copy of MAPublisher for Freehand around anymore, so I'm not 100% certain on the actual steps anymore, but this will get you going.

[Kevin McManigal]

Thanks Hans,

But I was hoping for an easier way. I was under the impression that I could assign coordinates to a couple of points, set the projection/scale, and then click the magic button. Has anyone seen the button?

[Hans van der Maarel]

Thanks Hans,

But I was hoping for an easier way. I was under the impression that I could assign coordinates to a couple of points, set the projection/scale, and then click the magic button. Has anyone seen the button?

There is an option for that. IIRC it's in the Xtras -> Map Scale menu. Basically you would say "point x,y in page coordinates is point X,Y in projected coordinates", then specify scale, rotation and projection.

[Andrew Patterson]

But I was hoping for an easier way. I was under the impression that I could assign coordinates to a couple of points, set the projection/scale, and then click the magic button. Has anyone seen the button?

I asked one of our Support-turned-QA guys how to do this (he used MAPublisher for years before joining us) and he fired up his AI10 to take a quick look. The FH & AI versions were pretty similar so this should work for FH as well, but this is what he's guessing you need:

1. Select layer to geo-reference.
2. Select 'Add MAP Parameters...'
3. Set the page & map anchor to a known point
4. Set the scale (and angle though that is presumably zero).
5. Hit OK
6. Select 'Projection Editor...'
7. Enter the projection information (the scale you entered above should be listed below).
8. Hit OK.

You may have to this for each layer, I can't remember what shortcuts (if any) existed.

If that doesn't do the trick, there's someone else I could ask, but he's off on Fridays so it would have to wait until Monday.

Hope that helps though!

[Kevin McManigal]

Well, I am doing things as instructed, but when I export shp files, nothing shows in Arc. Must be missing something. I will keep trying; please keep the suggestions coming.

Thanks

[Hans van der Maarel]

Well, I am doing things as instructed, but when I export shp files, nothing shows in Arc. Must be missing something. I will keep trying; please keep the suggestions coming.

Thanks

Could you send me one of those shapefiles?

[Kevin McManigal]

OK, here is some closure on this for anyone who ends up in the same boat. The folks over at Avenza have been super helpful and in the end wrote a little tutorial for geo-referencing with MapPublisher 5 in FreeHand MX. I have attached it here.

Along the way, I also found some things worth sharing:

1. When geo-referencing a graphic file, you don’t really have any points. All of the exported shp files will be either areas or lines.
2. You don’t need to set a projection, because MP 5 does not export prj files with the shp. You need to define a projection in ArcCatalogue before opening in ArcMap. Therefore, you only need to set the page coordinates to the real world coordinates under AddMapParameters. I was only able to get it to work with meters.
3. The program can be a little finicky if you have a mix of areas and lines in the same layer. Best to separate them out. Also, I found that when assigning the data type, you have to play around with selecting only the lines or areas in one layer, while having another layer of a similar type open, but not selected. It took a while to find a system that worked each time.

So, if anyone needs to use this older software, this should help. From the looks of it, the latest version of MP for Illustrator would make this process much easier. Too bad all of our files are in FH. I have to weigh the time loss in conversion corruption to using older software, and see where we come out.

Cheers, Kevin

Attached Files

•  Demo_Freehand.pdf   204.55K   73 downloads