Discussion: How can I enable others to draw maps?

There are some enthusiast couches becoming noticeable who
are trying to teach local kids orienteering sport, so the natural problem is to produce maps. They are somewhat limited with software (ocad is quite a lot of money for something you do on your spare time without clear direction where it will end up in).

What should they use?

I can produce contours lines and put them on a geo-referenced imagery, but what can be used to actuallly work on it?

I don't think that OCAD6 qualifies:
1) the size of the image you can put in its background is tiny.
2) I cannot even save to OCAD6.
3) Using it feels like a complete pain...

Not sure about newer versions of OCAD:
1) I think that our club has some licenses, but giving one to a potentially unqualified person feels like a waste of resources.

Is Oscape somewhat compatible? Is it an alley worth taking?

I would prefer that it
1) understands some OCAD (OCAD 9?) files.
2) can keep rotated background pictures
3) can be saved to OCAD.
Does it?

Or is there another way?

Is it worth looking at OpenOrienteeringMapper?

http://oorienteering.sourceforge.net/?page_id=103

One can produce simple maps by using OCAD-type techniques only using colored pens or pencils instead of a cursor.
Place a piece of mylar or other transparent paper over the base image and start tracing. But be careful; mylar is much less forgiving than is OCAD.

Talk to Ed Hicks. There is OCAD 11 starter version and you can get 5 licenses for about $130 each or a single licenses are about $180. There is also the academic version of OCAD Professional but it's a lot more. If it's a one time thing, maybe the trial version will work? and that's free.

The older version of OCAD is free.
The "Junior Mapper's Guide" has instructions for the beginner:
https://sites.google.com/site/juniormappersguide

OCAD6 is the correct way to scare people away.

Everyone, who recommends ocad6 as free alternative, should try to use it themselves, and then test oomapper, that Juffy already recommended.

Not sure what the percieved problem is with 0CAD 6, I drafted quite a few maps with it...

0CAD 6 was awful to use; Inkscape with the orienteering extensions was much, much more intuitive and tolerant. I could whip something up orders of magnitude faster with Inkscape, plus any idiot could import an image and use it as a reference. IMHO, YMMV, ETC.

If you were talking about 0CAD 3, I would agree witrh you...

OCAD6 is perfectly suitable for park/school maps, which appears to be what you want. It is rather annoying however that OCAD6 can't be saved to OCAD9, but if you still have 8 you can save it to that, and then save to 9 and above.

Contrary to scaring me away, and after a bit of kicking and screaming, OCAD 6 (or was it 5) was the version that convinced me to start drawing maps with software instead of pen and ink. And it did the job very well, or I wouldn't have asked someone how to turn on a computer (literally). The only drawback I recall was having to take a break at Tim Hortons across the street while waiting for the screen to redraw in windows 3.1 as the map file got larger.

Other alternatives such as Inkscape (which I've not used) only came along much later. Today I would agree with the suggestion that new mappers on a budget consider learning to use Open Orienteering Mapper.

If training new mappers, I'd also make a distinction between making maps and drawing maps. Fieldwork is (or should be) the more time consuming part of making a map, and is preferably, but not necessarily done by the same person who draws the map.

Fieldwork is (or should be) the more time consuming part of making a map

Not if you have good data to start with. My total fieldwork time for this year's Run Black Diamond is under 15 hours, whereas it took slightly longer than that to make the map (an extension of an existing map) as best as I could from photos and lidar; I then went and colored the vegetation the three shades of green in the field—that's all that remained to be done! I think Matej Sebo's experience with BAOC's latest map of Harvey Bear (many times larger than what I just did) was similar.

> Fieldwork is (or should be) the more time consuming part of making a map
Unless its an urban ISSOM map in which case the drawing will generally take a fair bit longer.