Natural Earth Data: Free Vector or Raster Map Data

[drjill]

After being sent to the site by a member, I spent the next half hour downloading ever single thing that could be of use to me. However I just discovered that all the files can't be read by any of the Adobe programs that I have. Are there any Mac programs available to open these files?

There are a few quite good Mac GIS programs that work natively with shapefiles. You should become familiar with the basics of GIS to take advantage of any of them. qGIS is a great open source app - I use it regularly (made for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux). Cartographica is a new commercial Mac OS GIS app that looks promising (though I have no personal experience with it). MyWorldGIS is a nice application developed primarily for education - it has some surprisingly powerful analysis features (my review) for an edu app and is relatively easy to use. GIS programs can have relatively weak cartography rendering but would be capable of manipulating (for example, clipping out areas of data) and exporting for further use. Ortelius (disclaimer of relationship here) is a map illustration app native to Mac with great cartographic rendering and imports shapefiles, though the current Standard Edition does not geo-register layers (this means you cannot import several layers and have them automatically align or change the projection - you can manually align layers). We are developing a Pro Ed that will have this functionality.

I also help with editing the NEV administrative boundaries. It is indeed a great data set made specifically for cartography. The different scale data are simplified accordingly and all layers at each scale "fit together" nicely. The shapefiles compliment (and inpired by) the great raster datasets of Tom Patterson's Natural Earth. If you search through shadedrelief.com you'll find a number of CS3 format files for download. Definite kudos to the visionaries to create it and make it public domain, and the volunteers and NACIS to build and support it.

Hope this helps.