Tutorial Cartography for Map Figures in Academic Journals & Books
This workshop will discuss approaches and guidelines for creating map figures for academic books and journals. I will use QGIS to illustrate one workflow in a graphical GIS. This general workflow can be applied to other graphical GIS programs or even non-map figures.
This workshop was developed by Dr. Michele Tobias from UC Davis (GPL 3.0 license) and updated to QGIS 3.22 with some minor changes by Dr. Hans van der Kwast, published on GISopencourseware. The original workshop can be found here.
2. Steps in Making a Map for a Journal Figure
2.6. Image Export
Refer to your publisher specifications. Export the format they ask for using the parameters they want. If it's a raster format (.jpg, .png, .tiff), export the image in the highest resolution they ask for.
Often you will submit lower resolution images for the review process and higher quality images for the final submission.
Caveats for the final submission: If they ask for 300 dpi or less, I'm still sending 600. If they don't specify an image format or resolution, I default to 600 dpi .tiff or .png. If they ask for a .ai or .eps file and you don't have access to Adobe Illustrator to create that, a plain .svg, or a .pdf will also work because Illustrator can open and edit these formats too.