| California State Automobile Association Enters the Digital Age
By Paula Holland Anyone who has ever used a street map from the California State Automobile Association (CSAA) for Northern California, Nevada, or Utah, can be certain that the map was created by one of CSAA's 11 mapmakers, also called cartographers. Every 15 to 21 months, the CSAA creates and revises approximately 100 regional, tour, and street maps that help the traveling public find its way more easily.
For senior cartographer and systems specialist, Jeff Holman, the goal of the CSAA Cartographic Department is to meet deadlines while creating maps of superior quality and accuracy. Every map contains tens of thousands of small details that must be drawn accurately and precisely to scale. For that reason, CSAA cartographers have come to rely heavily on Adobe Illustrator software. With its intuitive features, Adobe¨ Illustratorª allows them to express themselves as easily as drawing freehand with a pencil on paper.
Adobe Illustrator 8.0 provides more intuitive ways to accomplish the intricate steps and repetitive tasks that mapmaking requires," said Holman. "While each improvement to the Illustrator software may only save us a few mouse clicks, these savings really add up in a production environment where we complete the same file manipulations many times over." Humble Beginnings
In the days when maps were created by hand, the process was very slow and exceedingly labor-intensive, and included elements such as developing film in a darkroom, piecing together composite sheets, and manually sticking up type. Although the process was arduous and time-consuming, taking sometimes up to an entire year to create one map from scratch, it did serve CSAA well for many years.
But when software such as Adobe Illustrator came onto the scene, the art of mapmaking was revolutionized, making it faster and easier and saving more than 50 percent in man-hours per project. The Dawning of a New Age
CSAA began using Illustrator in 1989, as a pilot project on a few systems. When management at CSAA saw how much could be done in a fraction of the time it had taken to do manually, according to Holman, they flipped.
"When we first started out, it used to take us weeks or months to revise maps," Holman says. "We were able to cut that time nearly in half, and without adding staff."
To make the most efficient use of their software tools, cartographers at CSAA use enhancements of the user interface in Illustrator 8.0 to further improve the process and take the guesswork out of creating accurate, beautiful maps. Holman says that he especially likes the updated Pen tool in Illustrator 8.0. Positioning the Pen tool over a selected path or anchor point now automatically invokes either the Remove Anchor Point tool or the Add Anchor Point tool. This step is important because cartographers often must simplify or add more detail to complex paths many times a day.
Illustrator's Smooth and Erase tools also allow cartographers to quickly smooth out crooked paths or erase parts of paths. Holman simply drags the tool over a selected path to remove unwanted bumps and wrinkles, or to erase the path altogether. These enhancements save the trouble of going to the ToolBox or looking away from the work at hand. In addition, Illustrator 8.0 now provides a visual cue when the cursor is over a path or a point.
"The ability to know that the cursor is exactly where you need it when editing a road intersection, for example, takes the guesswork out of map revisions and can save me several steps," explains Holman. Other Illustrator Features
A new Illustrator 8.0 feature that Holman considers to be a big plus is the Free Transform tool. This enables cartographers to create tag labels for street names, for instance, then instantly rotate tag labels into the proper place with a mouse click and a drag.
"We complete operations such as rotating text to follow a street, hundreds of times per day. Illustrator 8.0 gives us a more elegant, one-step way to do it," says Holman.
ToolBox Key shortcuts are another big plus, according to Holman, who says that having a simple keystroke for accessing frequently used tools means incremental savings that add up over time.
"One of the best benefits we get from Illustrator 8.0 is how quick it makes our revisions," said Holman. "Once a public agency gives us information such as new subdivisions, annexations, or street name changes, we can scan the information into our computers, trace the new line work, scale it, then rotate into the current map. We can easily accomplish in one hour what used to take an entire day." And who would think that something as basic as the selection tools could be improved? In Illustrator 8.0, Adobe has added visual cues that show the user when the cursor is poised over a path or an anchor point. According to Holman, such a seemingly small change adds up to streamlined performance.
"Imagine preparing to move a large number of objects which have been painstakingly selected. With the new selection tools, cartographers can quickly tell if they've placed the cursor over an anchor point or path before clicking the mouse button," Holman says. "In the past, especially when zoomed out, it was easy to accidentally click in the wrong place and deselect all the artwork, a big waste of time."
CSAA cartographers also save time and produce more accurate maps using the new Smart Guides in Illustrator 8.0. Imagine trying to create a perfectly aligned "T" intersection on a road. Smart Guides automatically snaps created points to an existing path when using the Pen tool.
"When trying to align elements precisely, it's terrific to know you've got everything exactly where you want it, without having to zoom in on a piece of work to check alignment," Holman explains.
To maintain a consistent look across its maps, the CSAA Cartographic Department uses standard CSAA fonts, font sizes, tracking, leading, and other text characteristics. In the past, the group recorded macros using QuicKeys, a third-party macros program, as well as other software programs that automated the process of setting up and using the proper fonts. But cartographers were unable to achieve the expected results, as those programs oftentimes were slow and would not complete all the necessary tasks.
When CSAA migrated to Illustrator 8.0, the Actions Palette feature allowed them to automate CSAA's entire standard formatting to provide integrated type and paint specifications and automate other routine tasks.
"The ability to automate tasks directly within Illustrator is a big improvement over our previous methodology," says Holman. "Over the course of a several-month map production project, the Actions palette will likely save us several days. Beyond that, having an integrated solution will no doubt save us valuable support and maintenance time."
There are times when cartographers don't have a preset action for specific text, yet they need to use the same text style in several different places. In these cases, they use the enhanced text capabilities of the Eyedropper tool to sample text attributes such as leading, kerning and font size with a single click, and then apply them to other text using the Paint Bucket tool.
"While our environment is technically oriented, the bottom line is that Illustrator 8.0 offers outstanding enhancements-some of them seemingly small user interface tweaks-that make the many repetitive tasks we do to create beautiful, accurate maps far faster and easier than ever before possible," Holman says. A Stitch in Time
Perhaps the greatest benefit of using Illustrator to migrate from manual to electronic map creation is the time that's been afforded CSAA through more efficient map production, which translates into time available for starting new projects outside the department's scope.
With their surplus of time, the department has been able to begin new projects and develop products that otherwise would never have been considered because of the time demands of traditional manual map creation. As a result, the department has been able to take on projects that assist other departments within CSAA, as well as outside public agencies.
For example, the Cartographic Department was able to complete numerous maps for CSAA's Time for Travel publication, plus locator maps for the World Cup Soccer tournament. The Cartographic Department has also published recreational guides to Lake Tahoe and Yosemite and begun production of regional and street maps of Utah, a new territory for CSAA.
Currently in Holman's department of 13, only one full-time staffer still creates maps manually. In time, Holman anticipates a complete migration to an electronic format, and expects to see a financial return from CSAA's investment in Illustrator.
"It will be two or three more years before we're fully converted to the electronic format. But right now we are spending a lot less money on film and gaining much more time for other projects. In a few years, we'll begin to truly reap the rewards of efficiency that moving our map creations to an electronic format has afforded." About the Author:
Paula Holland is a freelance writer who lives in Campbell, Calif., and has written articles for Hewlett Packard. Back |
