Map software?

mourningdoves ,

I don't know of any mapping software, but I'd be very interested in seeing the end product of your efforts.

I've been buying old maps off eBay for some time now, as I like to use them to illustrate my webpages and album pages. I've recently started working on airmails, and using the maps to illustrate flight routes and postmarks like this from the Rhein und Main airmail flights of 1912:



My current solution is low-tech -- scanning the maps and Photoshopping the postmarks in place -- so I'd be interested in any advanced techniques you use.

A few years ago, I was working on something similar using Google Earth for my cover collection.

khj, Thanks for those links. I spent more time than I probably should have exploring the wonderful and - yes - wacky world of computer-aided cartography.

Take QGIS. I read several pages of their docs and found the following paragraph:



Those three sentences include two acronyms and a phrase - Albers Equal Area - I've never heard before. "2964" leaves me high 'n dry as well. And that's in the Getting Started section! I did learn that QGIS has the ability to import sections from Open Street Map and remove the vector layers that one doesn't need (in my case, streets). That's hugely promising and potentially a lot of fun, but maybe not much more huge than the learning curve. This will have to be a long-term project, though, for sure. Next time I'm at my Linux machine downstairs, I'll try installing it and put it through its paces as I can.



PostmasterGS, that map is absolutely gorgeous.



rolf, do you have any examples left? And/or elucidate the process you used? I only installed Google Earth once, on a Linux box a few years ago, and I couldn't get it to work

For now, I found a few vector maps online; I'll try loading them in LibreOffice Draw and/or Inkscape and seeing what I can do with them, maybe starting with Bulgaria or Albania - some place that's less complicated than Germany! I'm also going through the tutorials in Paint Shop Pro as I have time.

I have been accumulating atlases and maps at library booksales and was going to scan them, but decided that the pixel editing was beyond my resources. I may try making tracings (do you know how hard it can be to find tracing paper these days??) and, where I find a border, try doing some enlargements to make things line up. For instance, I've started to accumulate postmarks from places that were in Germany and are now in Poland or that were in Poland and are now in Belarus or Ukraine. Putting those together seamlessly could be a challenge. It could also be really fun.