Creating a map for a book

[seforimlover]

Hello,

For a book I am working on I would like to download a high resolution map (containing roads and rivers and so on, but not a topographical map) of central Europe (Germany, Poland, Lithuania), where I can remove all the English text and replace with Hebrew text using Photoshop or similar program. Google maps provides precisely the sort of map I need, unfortunately, I don't think it enables one to download book worthy (600 d.p.i. at the very least) images.

Thank you very much in advance to anyone who can point me in the right direction.

Yehuda

[bartmoss]

First of all: Welcome to the guild.

I wouldn't know any source. Google is your friend. I do know there is software to grab images off of Google Maps.

However, before you do use a map in this way, I strongly recommend that you read up on copyright laws and ideally consult your lawyer. Re-using other people's work so casually is potentially an easy way to get into a lot of trouble.

[Hai-Etlik]

Hello,

For a book I am working on I would like to download a high resolution map (containing roads and rivers and so on, but not a topographical map) of central Europe (Germany, Poland, Lithuania), where I can remove all the English text and replace with Hebrew text using Photoshop or similar program. Google maps provides precisely the sort of map I need, unfortunately, I don't think it enables one to download book worthy (600 d.p.i. at the very least) images.

Thank you very much in advance to anyone who can point me in the right direction.

Yehuda

Well, if you want public domain (so you can do whatever you want with it with no restriction) geographic data, Natural Earth is the place to go. The only issue is that you'll be getting data in the Shapefile format so you'll need a GIS to read it, style it, and export it to a graphics format. You'll also have to put it in a suitable projection

If you want to try this, download QuantumGIS, go to Natural Earth and download the layers you want, and try reading this tutorial.

As for the projection, load the shapefile I've attached as the first layer in the QGIS project and that should set the project projection to a nice conic projection centred in western Poland. Then activate "on the fly projection" (described in the tutorial) and everything you load should be displayed in that projection.

[seforimlover]

@bartmoss: Thank you for pointing out that I need to take due care about copyright laws.

@Hai-Etlik: Thank you for the link, now let me see if I can work out how to use it.

[jbgibson]

See if OpenStreetmap would be a good basemap for you.

[Hai-Etlik]

See if OpenStreetmap would be a good basemap for you.

OSM is under a Share Alike/Copyleft license. Anything made with it needs to be licensed under the same terms. That may not be appropriate for a book to be published.

[jbgibson]

Unless the author didn't mind having the map freely available -- such could be a good teaser to promote a book. You're right though - author / publisher / etc would need to understand the openness of the map up front.