ESRI still holds the marketing edge with the perception of creating
stunning maps, which captures the attention of end-users.
Oh, at the government level, absolutely, it's all about creating an
excellent cartographic product. Pretty pictures do matter.
I agree with the arguments of Grass supporters here, and particularly with
this last statement. The ability to crank out maps quickly on a Windows
machine using ArcGIS is the main reason I think ArcGIS is used so much at my
organization. Once the Grass plugins are up and running in Windows QGIS, I
think a real case can be made for using Grass/QGIS as a mapping tool of
choice. Our cartography standards consist of a 64-page pdf document
specifying the EXACT placement of cartographic elements, point sizes of
fonts, etc, and implementing these protocols for even one A-series map (one
of our standard production maps) in ps.map would be a nightmare. At the
moment I don't get to decide what operating system I use on a government
workstation (although I'm working on that), so I am forced to use
Windows/ArcGIS for production mapping at the moment. From what I've seen
from the cartography capabilities of QGIS, I'm pretty impressed, though. I'm
eagerly looking forward to any developments on the Windows side of QGIS.
Absolutely. And IMO this is one of the best ways to quickly dispel any
marketing FUD, as everyday folks might accept the word of a [biased]
"expert" in the absense of any other data, but put some stunning
screenshots of GRASS (or whatever) in action in front of them and
they'll believe their own eyes over some advertizing spiel, and adjust
their view of that "expert" accordingly. They'll even be willing to deal
with a new & difficult interface to get to the top of the hill if they
know how good the views can be.
Our cartography standards consist of a 64-page pdf document
specifying the EXACT placement of cartographic elements, point sizes
of fonts, etc, and implementing these protocols for even one A-series
map (one of our standard production maps) in ps.map would be a
nightmare.
Yes, but you only need to do it that one time!
From my perspective it would be *much* simpler to get things consistently
right in an auto-gen ps.map script versus a 20 minute point and click
journey every time you make a new map.
It's like LaTeX vs. Word. Or using GRI (/Matlab script) vs. Excel for
graphing.
I accept that most ps.map elements should be able to take absolute page
coordinates and percentage of frame for placement, and a few relevant
ones should be able to take easting,northing for placement as well.
Some do, but there is still some work to be done ...