Julia,
Two very good points. The first, cartographic output, comes up a few times
a year and OSGEO has a wiki page on it:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OSGeo_Cartographic_Library. In my opinion the
solution described on the wiki is way too ambitious and instead should focus on
creating a library of helper functions to deal with only the map surround
components (leave the symbology and GUI up to the desktop app, etc). My current
workflow calls for Mapserver to render the map portion in PDF (maybe someday
create a GeoPDF), and use Inkscape to interactively add most of the surround
(still have to figure out the graticule).
On the second point, image catalogs, GDAL's VRT format may be a good
replacement. But I don't know of a GUI tool to create/edit a VRT file, only a
couple of command line tools to create them. In theory, any desktop app using
the GDAL library should be able to use VRT files, but I haven't done any
performance testing...
Best Regards,
Brent Fraser
Julia Harrell wrote:
One thing I'll mention, in addition to all the other good comments that have already been posted,
is that I have a really difficult time trying to get the GIS users in my organization to even
consider making a switch to one of the open GIS desktop applications instead of the expensive
proprietary commercial package they currently use, because (more often than not) of the rather big
gap in the "aesthetic quality" of the cartographic products the open GIS packages can
(easily) produce. Despite continuing improvements over the last couple of years, the gap will still
need to close a good bit more in terms of "average GIS users" being able to quickly and
easily produce production quality map products before there's much real hope of any significant
numbers of them being willing to migrate to open GIS desktop packages. Some of the open GIS server
packages can produce some really beautifully rendered map images now, but the desktop packages
don't seem to be quite there yet. Eas
y map product templates (for unsophisticated end users) for placing all the map marginalia/decorations (labeling, symbols, legends, titles, charts, etc) and being able to produce a professional looking map quickly is still missing. All that "off the map crap" (as someone - I can't recall who - once called it) really does matter to a lot of our users, who often have to be able to compose and print (or render to PDF) some really slick looking, high resolution maps for public hearings and other meetings and presentations.
Being able to use the "old style" Arcview DBF file raster image catalogs in an open GIS desktop package is
another pain point for a lot of our users. We still use those a lot because we have some people who are tied to Arcview
3x (god help 'em) because of various extensions. I also prefer not to switch to a proprietary "geodatabase"
raster catalog because the DBF-based ones can also do double duty (in complete shapefile format) as raster catalog tile
index layers for Mapserver. I don't really want to have migrate a separate copy of our imagery to some proprietary
"geodatabase" raster catalog data structure that only a single product can use. Also, with our
"bandwidth issues" in remote field offices, connecting to a web map service is not always feasible, or even
possible. We need to be able to have our imagery in a raster catalog that resides a local network file server where
multiple users can all access it simultaneously in R-O mode, or even on a portable hard drive for
use out in the field. This kind of raster catalog functionality seems to still be missing in several open GIS desktop
packages that might otherwise be somewhat viable contenders as an Arcview replacement for "average" or
"casual" desktop GIS users. If such functionality does exists as a plugin somewhere, maybe I just haven't
found it yet, or maybe recent docs aren't fully available in English yet for some packages. If anyone can point me to a
link for an open GIS Desktop package that has a plugin for Arcview "old style" DBF raster catalogs, with
English docs, that "just works" with minimal manual configuration (no checking anything out of subversion or
compiling any source code), a few of our users will be very eager to give it a test.
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