Google eps?

August 15, 2006 8:54 AM

Is there any way to extract a vector image from Google Maps?
posted by pullayup to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

That would be totally sweet. Our neighborhood is not yet in any map service, so I downloaded the image, traced it in Illustrator, and added in our street. This isn't too hard to do but it takes a few hours, depending on how good you are with the pen tool.
posted by RustyBrooks at 8:55 AM on August 15, 2006

Do you mean extract the vector on-the-fly, as part of some Web application, or just turn one or two images into vectors so that you can mess with it at home?

If the latter, you could probably use Illustrator CS2's Live Trace feature (which is pretty cool) to pull out paths from the image pretty easily.

If the former, then probably not without some fancy API/GIS programming that I'm not qualified to advise you on.
posted by Hildago at 9:04 AM on August 15, 2006

Response by poster: Sorry about the vague question--what I'd like to do is export the map that Google renders on-screen as a vector file, say postscript/eps. Probably this would lead to massive copyright violations, so I'm guessing no...
posted by pullayup at 9:17 AM on August 15, 2006

I would highly recommend the products of Cartesia Software. They are at www.mapresources.com and have beautiful vector maps which are downloadable by the series or by the specific map.

Their work is excellent and their suppport is great.
posted by JakeWalker at 9:28 AM on August 15, 2006

Response by poster: Cartesia's maps are beautiful, and would be perfect--except that they haven't produced a map of ther region I need at a high enough level of detail (northwest Ohio, street level).
posted by pullayup at 9:42 AM on August 15, 2006

Best answer: why do you want the vector image? if it's just for higher res, you won't get it, those are jpgs as it is, therefore at a fixed resolution (gifs if it's not the satellite views, still fixed though). by saving these images as EPS and printing a larger version it's still just as if you enlarged the JPG and printed that
posted by qbxk at 10:31 AM on August 15, 2006

If you don't need the street names printed on the map, the Census Bureau's Congressional District maps go down to the street level. They're designed to be printed on butcher-paper-size sheets and hung on a wall.
posted by stopgap at 11:17 AM on August 15, 2006 [1 favorite]

You can get the street data from Tiger in the Tiger fomat. (MapMaker and TatukGIS viewer can read this data) and if you want a more portable format (have a look at the ArcGIS tiger data in shp format. Shp data can be read by with TatukGIS Viewer you can print to a PDF and then from Adobe Acrobat you can export it to a eps or ps.... =) Sounds hard, but it's not. With mapmaker you can export as an emf and dxf which both (theoretically) can be read by Illustrator.
posted by bigmusic at 11:47 AM on August 15, 2006 [1 favorite]

You might lookup the FreeGIS project too, if they are still around.
posted by baylink at 7:35 PM on August 15, 2006