Subject: Street Atlas Maps to Web (long)
Date: Sep 28 17:10:09 1999
From: Jerry Blinn - avisys at mindspring.com


In a message to me, Charles Swift asked the following:

"I was wondering if any of these Delorme products can be used to make maps
for web sites. I would like to make some maps of birding sites for our web
site."

Note: the objective is to get the Delorme map into GIF format for the web.

My study so far:

* In the second sentence of the "Electronic Use" section of the license
agreement, Delorme ~seems~ to allow such use, if "rights expressly granted"
includes "Paper Report Distribution Rights" However, it appears to me that
that is not the case. It seems that Delorme is a little paranoid about
electronic distribution by means other than their MapDocs facility, which
requires that each user have Street Atlas USA (SA). Nevertheless...

* There is no provision in SA to export or save a map in any graphics
format. However, there are ways.....

- In Windows 9x, add a printer to your printer list. Select the
Linotonic 300 (or equivalent) printer, and set it up with a destination as
"File." (You will probably need your Windows CD to get this driver, which
is supplied by Microsoft.) This "printer", rather than printing, will
create a Postscript file of the image being printed, in this case a Street
Atlas map. A Postscript file is a text "vector description" of the image
in the Postscript language, the industry standard for publishing. It can be
parsed by software to recreate the image.

- Create your map in SA.

- Select File / Print Current Map. Beware that SA tends to "print" a
map somewhat wider in scale than shown on the original screen. The print
dialog provides a control to rescale the resulting output as you require.

- In the print dialog, select Print Setup. Select the Linotronic (to
FILE) printer. Select Properties and click the Postscript tab. Set Output
Format to Encapsulated Postscript (EPS).

- Print your map. You will be prompted for a file name. Ignore what
has been asserted by SA, and rename the file to XXXX.EPS (XXXX being the
name you provide) and provide the path you wish.

- The resulting file contains a Postscript copy of the map. You have
been liberated from Street Atlas.

Now that you have a usable copy in something other than SA format, here's
the tough part. You need an application that can transform this into a GIF
file for use on your web site. I tried Word and Word Perfect, and neither
could do anything of any quality. Microsoft has always hated Adobe, so I
can understand why Word does virtually nothing with EPS files. WP tries
much harder, but just doesn't pull it off. Adobe PageMaker doesn't do much
better. HiJaak gets close, but the quality suffers for some reason. Corel
Photohouse doesn't recognize EPS. Adobe Photodeluxe has problems with it.

Two possibilities require that you have some relatively expensive software
-- you just knew that was going to happen, didn't you?

Adobe Photoshop handles things with ease. Simply open the .EPS file, do
what you want with it, and select File / Save for Web. Voila! A GIF file
you can use in your web pages. You will want to play around with the
resolution in the save dialog to be sure you get the size image you want.
(I no longer have a copy of Photoshop LE, so I don't know if that
inexpensive (often free) product will work.)

Another approach is to use Adobe Acrobat. In this case you need Acrobat
Distiller, an expensive ($230 - but I think still free with PageMaker)
product that can read .EPS files and produce Acrobat (.PDF) files. The
resulting .PDF files can be read by Photoshop and converted to GIF, but
this step is most useful in that almost everybody has the Acrobat Reader
(it can be downloaded free from the Adobe site). You could place the .PDF
files for download from your web site and provide the best possible
printable output.

So, there are ways.... Not cheap, and not no-brainer, but very doable,
especially if you already have access to the software, or can borrow
somebody's computer with the right software long enough to convert the .EPS
files.

The key is that by adding a Postscript printer to Win 95/8 you can create
..EPS files and get out from under the Street Atlas format.

Jerry Blinn
Silverdale, WA
EMail: avisys at mindspring.com
Web site: www.avisys.net