LINKING ILLUSTRATION AND MAPPING SOFTWARE THROUGH POSTSCRIPT

Doyon and Gibson’s 1988 survey suggests that the principal product of most North American university cartography laboratories is information graphics for presentation and publication.1 Authors who illustrate their own manuscripts, artists who prepare maps for periodicals and books, and many commercial mapmakers also are engaged in design for presentation. The goals of presentation cartography differ in some respects from those of analytical cartography, particularly in that visual appeal— which may be gratuitous in a map constructed specifically for analysis—is often highly valued in maps presented to the public. The importance of achieving visual appeal affects the functional requirements of the tools used to design and create presentation graphics. A large and diverse set of software programs is available for computer-assisted cartography, but no one package can reasonably be expected to satisfy every mapping purpose. Mapping and geographic information systems (GIS) software programs offer impressive analytical tools, but do not provide graphic design capabilities comparable to those available in PostScript-based illustration packages. This article describes how mapping software can be linked with illustration packages by reformatting PostScript graphics files. PostScript links among three mapping packages (WORLD, NCAR GRAPHICS, and SURFER) and two illustration packages (ILLUSTRATOR 88 and FREEHAND) are described. © 1991 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.