Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with counties

making a printable map

D-ten — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 12:01:23 -0800

How to make a print quality map of office locations that includes county boundaries. I'm working on creating a map for print that shows the various cities where our offices are located. Our non-profit locale is defined by counties, so my map needs to show the counties that comprise our operational area, the cities in which our offices are located, and hopefully some kind of highlighted road marker between the locations.
I can easily get the cities and road marker by adding destinations on maps.google.com, but am having problems with the county boundaries part. Plus I don't think that's copyright free, plus the 72 DPI screen grab will print horribly.
My budget for this is basically zero, so purchasing software isn't possible. What are some options for getting this done in a quality fashion?

"Oh, Two One, Three Four"!

rossination — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 10:25:52 -0800

I'm trying to find a list of Washington counties by zip code. Why is it so hard to find? I imagine that there are some zip codes that cross county lines, but still - isn't there a list where I can look up "99223" and see that it's in Spokane county, or see that "98195" is in King? Googling leads to several sites that are only for King county, and lots of laminated "zip code posters".

FWIW, this is for a Filemaker address book database. I'd like to be able to have a calculation where the county field is filled in when a certain zip code is entered. Yeah, I know, it's not that hard to just have someone enter the county, but this would be mainly used on old records that we don't have the time to sort through.

Thanks in advance.

County Contiguity

thrako — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 17:30:28 -0800

I need a data file describing which US counties border which other US counties. Is it somewhere on the internet? I don't have any GIS software, so I need the data in a more general format. I have googled and all I can find is a couple of states covered separately. I know I can generate this from the ASCII Census border files but I would rather not re-invent the wheel. Thanks in advance.