SoC Software

Adobe Illustrator is a leading desktop illustration tool for Macintosh and Windows and comes as part of Adobe Creative Suite 3.

CorelDRAW Graphic Suite is another desktop illustration package, very popular with Windows users.

ESRI ArcGIS is one of the leading pieces of GIS software. It consists of a suite of applications allowing the user to perform advanced spatial analysis, model operational processes and map the results.

Macromedia FreeHand is another popular piece of software for desktop mapping. It was recently discontinued but is still used quite widely.

MapInfo Professional is a powerful Microsoft® Windows®-based mapping and geographic analysis application designed to allow easily visualization of the relationships between data and geography.

Avenza Software Inc's MAPublisher
Developed for GIS (Geographic Information Systems) professionals, cartographers and map producers, MAPublisher is a suite of GIS plug-ins for Adobe Illustrator designed to enable high end graphic enhancement and quality-controlled map production. MAPublisher imports MapInfo mid/mif,Arc/Info ungenerate and USGS DLG (US Geological Survey, Digital Line Graph) files directly into Adobe Illustrator with all attributes intact, allowing attribute editing in customized maps. You can get more information from Avenza's WWW site.

Geomatica by PCI Geomatics offers "...solutions for all of your geomatics processing needs while maintaining complete interoperability with outside software packages.". It is primarily designed for use with applications such as Arc/Info, GRASS and MicroStation.

DXF to Illustrator
Utrecht University's very useful utility for converting DXF files to Adobe Illustrator files. It even saves the files with layers ! Works equally well with FreeHand 7