At 09:25 AM 5/12/03 -0400, Mpierce1@aol.com wrote: >richhill@twcny.rr.com writes: > > Here is another idea. The federal government has an online site where > you can download topo maps for anywhere in the country and you can zoom > in and out to several different scales. > > Here is the url: http://geonames.usgs.gov/ > >I've heard this before, but I can never find any USGS map download capability >at this site or any other. What are you referrring to? Mike, The site is the query form off of this page. Here's the URL: http://geonames.usgs.gov/pls/gnis/web_query.gnis_web_query_form You query the system with as much of the information that you have, and you will be presented with either a table of results to choose from (if there is more than on hit) or with a report of a single hit. Once you find the one you're interested in, if you scroll to the bottom of the page, you'll see the following: "Display FIPS55 Place Code Note: Not all place codes are available through this site. To search the FIPS55 database or download FIPS55 files, go to the FIPS55 site View USGS Digital Raster Graphic (DRG) covering this feature from TerraServer. A DRG is a digitized version of a USGS topographic map. Visit the USGS Digital Backyard for more information. View USGS Digital Orthophoto Quadrangle (DOQ) covering this feature from TerraServer. A DOQ is a black-and-white, aerial photographic image map. Note that images are not available for all locations. Visit the USGS Digital Backyard for more information. Show Feature Location using maps produced from the U.S. Census Bureau's Tiger Map Server. Find the Watershed for this feature using the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's site." It's the link to the Digital Raster Graphic which you want. Clicking this link will send you to the Terraserver ( http://terraserver.microsoft.com ) and return the initial topo map for the area you searched for. You can make this map larger, zoom in or out, and pan in all directions. I have downloaded and combined these maps into a pretty good chunk part of Rutherford Co., NC, and I have a few plats on that map, with plans to add many more later when I can find a way to accurately identify where they should be. Peace, Part of the Tree, Greg >I have gone to the USGS sales office near DC and asked and they say there is >no such product.

All, At the USGS website and other sites like topozone.com you view only a small part of a topo/DRG, you have to save the .jpg and paste/combine many of them together to make a useable map or to make one USGS quadrangle. You need to be competent in some type of Graphic program like photoshop to combine/align their(.jpg) borders. DRG= Digital Raster Graphic=Topographic Map DeedMapper maps are made from DLG's =Digital Line Graphs, Not topos/DRG's. DRG/topo maps have a lot of information on them and many colors. My experience using them with deedmapper is that it is difficult to see your plats (especially if you have many plats close together!) on them because of all the "busy colors & lines" greens, browns, elevation lines, power lines, roads boundaries national park boundary, etc... all the "Stuff" that makes topos useful. When you zoom in with deedmapper the topo image quality also suffers for the simple reason is that they are scanned images. If you use topos as a background image in deedmapper and align you plats to it, then toggle/switch to the deedmapper maps/DLG's (so you can see your plats more clearly)your plats will not be aligned to the deedmapper map. This gets very frustrating ! So my advise is choose one map or the other and stick to it. You can embark on a mission to teach yourself a whole new area of computing - GIS, and buy additional software so that you can edit your GIS information. If you go through all of this you will not need Deedmapper for platting since you will have spent a small fortune on other more advanced software. DRG= Digital Raster Graphic and DLG's =Digital Line Graphs and other GIS dataset downloads are available at very reasonable price's at many places on the WWW. I use two identical projects - one with DRG's, one with DeedMapper/DLG's. So much for my $0.02 worth Best, Regards, Bill