Hello everyone,
I am in the middle of a great internship with a small non-profit nature conservancy that manages around a dozen preserves. Currently, all of the official trail maps we have need an overhaul. Specifically, they need to be designed and polished to compete with the quality of State or National park trail maps (and I just got approved to use Illustrator). I am believe I am reasonably capable of this, for in college I learned how to use Adobe Illustrator with ArcMap to design and edit the maps. But there one big hang up I keep stumbling on and have been having issues with. How do I get high quality topo contour lines in ArcMap for Illustrator export? I need this line work to be smooth and clean looking when in illustrator, and want to avoid having to trace over each contour at all cost. I assume adding the elevation label will have to be done individually on Illustrate to fully customize it (label location, type style, font size).
Is there a shp or kml file with contour lines? Most likely can see myself using 20ft intervals.
If anyone has tips on requiring high quality hill shade relief, that would also be appreciated.
OSM does not deal with elevations (other than a few spot elevations on POIs), topography, relief, etc. So you need to look elsewhere for contour data.
There is DEM (digital elevation model) data freely available for the whole world. If you are in the USA look through the nationalmap.gov website run by the USGS for a place to download from. Most of it is SRTM (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission) based and is adequate (seems to be what current US Topo maps from the USGS use. But there might be higher resolution data available in your area especially if you live in Europe.
Those DEM files simply contain arrays of elevation numbers. To turn that into contour data, look to the GDAL utilities. Not sure if you can run those on Windows but you can on Unix based systems like MacOS and Linux. Specifically look at gdal_contour https://gdal.org/programs/gdal_contour.html Lots of options for it. DEM data is in meters, I convert it to foot based (using another GDAL utility) before generating contours. The contour output should be able to be input into things that generally understand GIS data.
PS: The same DEM data files can be run through some other GDAL utilities to create hill and/or slope shading too.