From the course: InDesign Secrets
382 Free, high-quality maps in vector format - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
382 Free, high-quality maps in vector format
- [Instructor] Everyone needs to make a map sooner or later. Maybe a detailed street map or a map of where Austria is in Europe or something. But there's one thing that all maps have in common, they're a total pain to draw. But I'm here to show you a way to make maps that is super easy, super powerful, and actually kind of fun. The trick is to use a free plugin called ArcGIS Maps for Creative Cloud. And actually it won't run inside of InDesign, but it does run inside of Illustrator. So I'm going to switch over to Illustrator and to find this plugin you just need to go to the Window menu and then choose Find Extensions on Exchange. That takes you to the Adobe Exchange Marketplace where you can just search for maps and ArcGIS will show up here, from there you can just click on its name and then you'll see a Free button to install it. Yes this is totally free. Anyway, I've already installed this so it says Acquired. So now I'm going to switch back to Illustrator and you can find it here in the Window menu under the Extensions sub menu, there it is ArcGIS Maps. Now I can't give you a full tutorial on how all of this works but I'll give you the quick version, first you find the location you want, like I'm going to search for Palo Alto, California. Then I need to draw out a rectangle to show the extent of the map that I want. You give it a name and click OK. And when the map is looking just the way you want, you can click this little Preview button here. That opens this other panel, the Compilation panel and here's where you get to say what you want in the map. Right now it's a topographic map, which is just a bit mapped image, but I want actual vector art, so I'm going to click on this little menu over here and set the base map to Vector Street Map. Then I click the download or sync button here and it gives me this warning which I'm just going to ignore. And then it starts to download the data. Now this could take a while depending on how much data there is. Then, once it's done you'll see this little success message. So now I can go ahead and close those panels and there's the map inside of Illustrator. But here's where it gets really awesome, because look at my Layers panel. Oh my gosh look at all of those layers. And that means I can turn off some of those layers to simplify the map. Like I don't need all of these labels in here. You can see how much control you have here. Also remember these are just vector paths in Illustrator, so you can change their color, edit them, change the font of the labels, whatever you want. Then, when you're done save this as a pdf or an AI file and place it in your InDesign document. So you're probably asking, why did the mapping company that makes this called ESRI E-S-R-I why did they release this incredible tool for free? Well because while this does everything most of us need, some companies, especially the large enterprise and government organizations that ESRI works with, they need even more map and demographic data, so ESRI is giving this free tool to everyone because they know a few of you work for big companies who can afford their more advanced or in-depth mapping tools. I love it when I discover this kind of win-win where I can get an awesome tool for free. You should definitely check this out.
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Contents
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161 Keeping page numbers on top of master items3m 55s
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162 Adding automatic currency symbols in a table cell or before text3m 50s
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163 Make a pop-up footnote for your ebook3m 48s
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164 Deleting tabs at the beginning of paragraphs and applying a paragraph style3m 10s
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165 Five InDesign Presentation tips6m 28s
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089 Three great Object Styles for any designer8m 1s
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090 Choosing alpha channel image transparency2m 25s
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091 Adding and reading metadata for InDesign files3m 25s
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092 Adding ALT tags to your images6m 59s
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093 How to Place & Link a text frame's text but not its formatting7m 4s
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094 Setting the baseline position of a caption2m 39s
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051 Five things that should be in every new file5m 19s
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052 Forcing EPUB page breaks with invisible objects6m 21s
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053 Understanding component information6m 39s
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054 Creating running heads using section markers4m 16s
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055 Making a font with InDesign using the IndyFont script5m 20s
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056 Finding where that color is used7m 17s
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037 Updating a linked table without losing formatting5m 18s
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038 Creating electronic sticky notes4m 49s
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039 Moving master page items to the top layer for visibility2m 48s
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040 Five guide tricks that will impress your coworkers6m 18s
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041 Letting InDesign add the diacritics4m 21s
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042 Using single-cell table cells for custom paragraph formatting6m 2s
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