Susan Jones57 said:@Paul, Iron Man and the rest
How exactly are you guys generating these maps with the parcel boundaries and colored residential zones?
I certainly hope you aren't actually drawing all of this by hand.
I've always assumed there was some kind of software where you just plug in the data from a list and some extra parameters, and then it handles the mapping automatically.
Mine are mostly done in Paint, so yeah, I do them manually.
Lately, I’ve been liking to shrink the maps down. I do that so people can't just rip my work—like a map of US settlements—without effort. If I can do it, they can too, but let them struggle if they want. On some other maps, you can see the pixels.
Sure, there are programs, but Esri's ArcGIS is expensive, and its main purpose isn't really making these types of maps that hardly anyone in the West cares about anyway. Plus, you have to draw the settlement boundaries in there first, then input all the data into tables. Doing that is a nightmare... it's neither easy nor fast. Sure, it might speed things up once you reach that stage, but at the end of the day, I prefer Paint. The first map I made back in 2005, if I remember correctly, I had to manually draw about 500 municipalities or whatever we had here. After that, I was done with it. Drawing municipalities or any kind of polygon is just a tedious process.
Now in the West, they have all those layers ready to go. You just download them, hit the Census Bureau website, grab whatever data you need, and whip up an opacity map in no time. This process is way more efficient in America than it used to be back in the old days...