Welcome to Mapublisher!

Dear Class:

This week you will be introduced to a great program -- or plug-in -- called Mapublisher (see the cool brochure here). Mapublisher works within FreeHand (or Illustrator); so you don't even have to learn a new program's interface to use it.

What it does is make FreeHand a GIS. You can import GIS shapefiles, GeoTIFFs, spatial data tables, and even query things. (If you don't understand any of this, please don't panic, but just hang in there!) You can even export your map as a georeferenced shapefile or GeoTIFF when you are done.

Even more crucially, it allows you to do the following things right in FreeHand:

• Re-project your map;
  
• You can label points, lines, and polygons;
  
• Design fancy graticules;
  
• Make arbitrary coordinate systems (e.g., A-H, 1-5);
• Have Mapublisher index all of the places and create a table of contents for the back side of your map (e.g., Duluth: C-5; Minneapolis: E-4);
• You can create buffers, scales, and even systematically design visual variables; and
  
• Create very detailed and preformatted legends.

It does a lot more, but you won't even necessarily need to use it to do the above. The crucial thing is that it allows you to import all types of raster and vector data that is available online and elsewhere right into FreeHand and layer the data on top of one another so they align perfectly. For those of you using FreeHand, this plug-in will be the program that allows you to get the cartographic data you need to make your maps into FreeHand.

Unfortunately, the department only has licenses for Mapublisher in FreeHand. Those of you using Illustrator may want to test Mapublisher out in FreeHand -- at least the ins-and-outs found in the tutorial -- and then when you have your data, download the Trial Version of Mapublisher for Illustrator -- which is good for 10 days. You may want to do this over Spring Break (if you aren't going anywhere) so that you have ample time to import your data and play around.

Also, for those of you who have FreeHand, or will download a trial version of it, you can download a Trial Version of Mapublisher too. 10-day limit, though. Finally, a further drawback is that we can only use Mapublisher on seven computers at a time. So please work in groups of two or three when you are going through it.