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by johnymontana 1320 days ago
Is anyone using Affinity for cartography? I’m currently using ArcGIS —> Illustrator workflow but am curious if a QGIS —> Affinity workflow is feasible.
1 comments

So, I've been using Illustrator for years with an OSM -> Illustrator workflow where I start with OSM XML, feed it to osm2ai.pl, and then wholly style it by hand. It's... fine... but Illustrator's cost is getting to me.

I gave QGIS -> Affinity a cursory look the other day and had no problem taking my results from an Overpass query and exporting it from QGIS as SVG and bringing it into Affinity. So, that gave me a ton of hope.

The opening of Illustrator files in Affinity Designer kinda sucks (my dashed paths for trails come in as tons of different objects, like it's actually only bringing in the PDF preview) but if I start anew on some of the maps I think it'll be fine.

I just bought the 2.0 package mentioned here and the next map I do I'll be doing in Affinity Designer to see how it goes. Fingers crossed!

Thanks for sharing. I wasn't aware of osm2ai - looks helpful!

I'm starting a new project this week and will test out the QGIS -> Affinity workflow and write up any findings.

Thanks! I'd love to hear that.

A while back I thought about making my maps in QGIS, but found the stuff for styling the map just... lacking. It was a LOT easier to do what I wanted in Illustrator. But there was still the problem of getting the bare vectors into there for styling.

Holy grail for me would be some sort of OSM -> Affinity where I can define groups based on OSM tags.