User talk:Coulraphobic123
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[edit] Response: How to Make County Maps
Glad to read you're interested in making maps. This has been an unofficial task of mine, and it initially started with just Arizona, but has moved onto other places. Also, I am no longer the only one doing these type of maps. User:Arkyan has went ahead and developed a script that reads U.S. Census geographical data and automatically generates map files. (read more at that bot page. By making the process automated, he has been able to make SVG maps for all counties in four or five states by now. The only downside to that is that the maps are based on data from the 2000 Census, and so don't reflect the most current boundaries of cities that have expanded in the past 7 years. This is fine for all of the maps for which the cities haven't grown, but areas which are expanding rapidly won't have the most current map data. This is why I have mainly stuck to larger urban areas that haven grown noticeably in the past near-decade.
Going back to your original question, though, to actually make the maps, I use data like the PDF files you found, and from there, I usually take a screenshot of the map, and then import that into Inkscape, which is a free SVG image-drawing program. The work is tedious, and Inkscape takes some getting used to, but the results are great and are usually the most up-to-date. If you're not willing to do that much work just for some boring grey maps, then I suggest just waiting until the ArkyBot gets to South Dakota maps, and it will be done for you, but if you would like to do it before then, or you wanted to make sure the most accurate reflections of the city borders are shown, then just download Inkscape and get tracing!
Good luck, and I hope that helped. Ixnayonthetimmay 00:33, 26 August 2007 (UTC)
- Thank you both for the help, I really appreciate it! :) Coulraphobic123 17:44, 27 August 2007 (UTC)
