6 replies to this topic

[cityprints]

Hi gang - I'm new to the forum, so happy I found it!

 

I'm an a Mac and I'm looking for a good GIS solution that won't break the bank. I need a way to export map data (basically just the shapes of the streets) into Adobe Illustrator. I'd like to avoid using Bootcamp, since I export into Adobe Illustrator and I run all my graphics programs in the Mac operating system, so the switching back and forth won't be very efficient. 

 

Does anyone have ideas on the best way to do this?

 

Thanks for your time!

 

 

[David Medeiros]

Q-gis is free and works on Macs. It's a pretty lite GIS comapred to ArcGIS but can read and export .shp files and should be prefect for a GIS to Illy workflow.

 

http://www.qgis.org/

[Hans van der Maarel]

+1 for QGis, and you also may want to look into MAPublisher, that's a plug-in for Illustrator that allows you to import GIS data and work with it like you would in Arc.

[Tom Patterson]

You might also want to look at Cartographica:

 

http://www.macgis.com/index.php

 

It sounds interesting, although I do not use it.

[cityprints]

This is a huge help guys, thanks so much! I checked them all out and these are all good options, but I'm going to try QGIS first, since it's open source. 

 

David - I have a dumb question. I'm going to want to export vector data into Illy - what is the best data source to use? I'm primarily looking for big world cities. 

 

Thanks for your time everyone!

[David Medeiros]

Natural Earth Data is a great place to start for base map level GIS layers. They have .shp files for a number of cultural and physical features at three different scales. There are also a number of complimentary raster files for terrain and bathymetry there.

 

http://www.naturalearthdata.com/

 

Diva-GIS is another good source of global and national level base data.

 

http://www.diva-gis.org/Data

[Martin Gamache]

Check out Open Street Map is probably the best for cities.