Vector street map of Columbus, OH suburb?

August 6, 2008 1:19 PM

Can you help me locate editable vector street map of southeastern suburbs of Columbus, Ohio?

Specifically something that I can open up in Adobe Illustrator, and change the typeface, colors, etc.
Also, that covers the areas of Reynoldsburg, Pickerington, and Canal Winchester.
There is some money in a budget to pay for the map, but not a lot.
Thanks in advance.

posted by UnclePlayground to travel & transportation around Columbus, OH (3 answers total)

GIS might be the way to go here. Here's some free maps for Franklin County, Ohio. I took a GIS class and my instructor said that she used Illustrator to clean up her ugly-looking maps from the GIS software (she does maps/data presentation for the NYT), although we never got to that, but i'm pretty sure it can be exported from something like ArcView or ArcGIS (which, i should say, also allow you to play with colors, typeface, and labels to a large degree). Maybe someone who knows a little more can tell you specifically how to do this.
posted by ofthestrait at 1:54 PM on August 6, 2008

Couldn't find Pickerington, but the data for Reynoldsburg and Canal Winchester are freely available right here, specifically in the "Digital Line Graphic - Roads" column. But you can't really open that in Illustrator, and you can't open it directly in ArcGIS Explorer, so once you download and unzip it you have to convert it to a format they can use, then open it in ArcGIS Explorer, then export into a vector image format.

You can view those DLG files directly with dlgv32 Pro, but it won't let you export SVGs without registering a copy.

Ultimately, there's probably an easier way that what I mentioned above. I'll take another look later on this evening.
posted by cog_nate at 2:33 PM on August 6, 2008

Try Columbus, OH in openstreetmap.org. Openstreetmap.org is in general a cool project to create good, freely distributable maps. The maps are based on Tiger/line data from the U.S. census so they are fairly decent (though not perfect) to start with.

You can edit roads/features in your own area to fix all those pesky mistakes and outdated information. I did this for a several mile radius of where I currently live & right now the openstreetmap data is the cleanest by far of any print or online map of that area that I have seen (ie, better than Google maps, Yahoo maps, Rand McNally, etc.).

And (though I haven't tried it personally) you can export the information and maps in a few different formats (for instance, SVG, PDF, postscript), then further edit it as necessary.
posted by flug at 4:13 PM on August 6, 2008 [1 favorite]