Simplifying divided highways into a single line
Because mapping divided highways at a small scale has too much detail, we can simplify the lines rather than redrawing them in Adobe Illustrator.
The basic concept
- Duplicate the roads layer
- Make desired lines black, about 4 point
- Rasterize the layer
- Use image trace, the Line Art option
- Use the original roads layer for referencing attributes in MAPublisher.
Benefits of this approach
- Simplification is done inside Illustrator
- Huge time savings over redrawing
- Clean, but accurate, lines
Do you have a better approach?
If there’s a way to do this in QGIS, I would like to know.