By: Erik Vlietinck
Tue, January 22, 2008 - 6:57:00

http://www.avenza.com

Avenza Systems produces MAPublisher cartographic software for Adobe Illustrator and Geographic Imager spatial tools for Adobe Photoshop. The company just announced the release of MAPublisher 7.6 for Adobe Illustrator. MAPublisher 7.6 is the latest version of this software used to produce high quality maps from GIS data.

MAPublisher 7.6 for Adobe Illustrator is a full product update that is free of charge to all current MAPublisher Maintenance Program subscribers and replaces the current shipping version of MAPublisher, version 7.5, for all new customers using Adobe Illustrator CS2 or CS3.

“The inclusion of live GPS data collection and drawing is a tremendous new built-in feature that we know many users will enjoy and find to be extremely useful,” said Ted Florence, President of Avenza.

MAPublisher 7.6 includes all the significant functionality introduced in earlier releases of MAPublisher 7.x including a new intelligent labeling engine, new grid, graticules and scalebar generators, a new and improved MAP attributes engine with expression builder, advanced selection filters and enhanced map index creation and image registration.

MAPublisher 7.6 for Adobe Illustrator adds novel features such as:

• GPS data can be automatically drawn, joined, attributed and styled (or symbolized) on any projected plane in Adobe Illustrator in real-time while connected to a USB or Bluetooth GPS receiver
• Improved MAP Selection Filters functionality
• Improved Join Lines functionality
• Improved Map Location tool
• Highlighting map features when selected in the MAP Attributes window
• Zoom-To-Art functionality directly from the MAP Attributes window
• UTM Grid labeling functionality
• Various other user interface improvements and performance enhancements to improve usability including additional support for Unicode characters

Version 7.6 may be the most important update ever. It will certainly empower cartographers more --making their jobs easier and more efficient-- than the software has done since we last reviewed it.