9 replies to this topic

[Southern Survey]

I guess the hardest part of being new to the forum is finding which category to post in. I bought adobe illustrator fairly cheap with my wife's student discount. I was wondering if anyone had any experience with the program Manifold?

Also, I need to view .sid and convert to .jpg to bring aerial images into my survey work. I use Traverse PC for drafting and it is super easy to manipulate pictures and scale to survey work. I am just trying to figure out some of these other GIS file formats and how they work for me.

I did order two books from the InterLibraryExchange. Borden Dent's Cartography and Cynthia Brewer's Designed Maps. We will see what we can do. I was just wanting some advice on very economic GIS software.

Casey

[Jimbo]

Do not buy Manifold until version 9 is released. If your new to the Manifold world it has been three years since the last release & customers have been getting frustrated with that company (Manifold is losing customers). You should consider alternatives such as Global Mapper, & gvSIG.

[Hans van der Maarel]

+1 for Global Mapper and I'm also quite fond of QGis.

[sitesatlas]

I use Manifold on a regular basis. Like other Manifold users, I'm frustrated that version 9 hasn't come out yet. But despite that, the current version of Manifold is a great product at a great price. Global Mapper is another good product, but it is more for importing, viewing, transforming, and exporting data. Manifold does those things, too -- though it is often slower than Global Mapper. But if you need to do more elaborate tasks, such as performing GIS operations, working with object attributes and databases, labeling features, etc. Manifold is a good choice for a tight budget. The websites for both Global Mapper and Manifold provide lots of information and you can check out the product manuals, too.

[SouthernCross]

Geomedia makes a good product too. I'll also second the notion for QGIS as I feel there are plenty of strong open source options out there. Manifold has never blew my socks off.

My sleeper would be gvSIG. I use this product all the time at work when I get sick of ArcGIS. Its very feature-rich, easy to use and best of all... its free.

[matt]

Sincere agreements w/ all above.

I am a big fan of Manifold, but its image processing (esp. w/ MrSID) can be clunky and prohibitively slow.

QGIS and gvSIG are great resources and are worth taking the time to exlore/learn.

- Matt

[Maptitude]

I need to view .sid and convert to .jpg ... I was just wanting some advice on very economic GIS software.
Casey

You should consider the $495 Maptitude Mapping Software. Maptitude has basic image layer support, but can handle MrSIDs and can save maps out to jpg.

Disclaimer: I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.

[Kalai Selvan]

I would consider Global Mapper the BOSS for many GIS task..

I guess the hardest part of being new to the forum is finding which category to post in. I bought adobe illustrator fairly cheap with my wife's student discount. I was wondering if anyone had any experience with the program Manifold?

Also, I need to view .sid and convert to .jpg to bring aerial images into my survey work. I use Traverse PC for drafting and it is super easy to manipulate pictures and scale to survey work. I am just trying to figure out some of these other GIS file formats and how they work for me.

I did order two books from the InterLibraryExchange. Borden Dent's Cartography and Cynthia Brewer's Designed Maps. We will see what we can do. I was just wanting some advice on very economic GIS software.

Casey

[Steven Gordon]

I used Manifold 8 for several years. The price is fantastic for the capabilities you get. I used Manifold to import large data sets on my Windows Vista desktop. I liked that I could screen the attributes before data was imported so I could reduce the size of the data on import as well as perform some editing at the same time. After cleaning up the data--merging layers, removing extraneous geographic features, etc.--I'd export shapefiles for import into Illustrator using MAPublisher.

Manifold's export in Illustrator format was okay. I could get nearly complete maps done as long as they were simple. Type-on-a-path was a villain. Couldn't come into Illustrator as whole text strings. So to make it work, I'd over-simplify a copy of the layer (streets, rivers) and get point-type objects as a result.

Anyway, Manifold allows you up to 5 downloads/activations of the software. In my case, I blew through my fifth and last one when Windows froze during one of its many updates and the OS could not be booted. To rebuild the disk and download Manifold again would have cost me repurchasing the software.

Currently, I run MAPublisher on my MacBook Pro. When it gets bogged down, I'll import and process data using Quantum GIS (Qgis) on my Windows Vista machine. This open-source software runs quickly and reliably for me. I can occasionally produce a nearly finished map on it as long as it has minimal type. I output as a PDF and clean it up in Illustrator.

[Sky Schemer]

Anyway, Manifold allows you up to 5 downloads/activations of the software. In my case, I blew through my fifth and last one when Windows froze during one of its many updates and the OS could not be booted. To rebuild the disk and download Manifold again would have cost me repurchasing the software.

Manifold has provided a means to obtain additional activation keys.