A Short History Continued....page 3

The Company also dovetailed with the Canadian National Committee for Cartography by regularly contributing its maps to the Canadian National Exhibit.  The National Exhibit is a biannual event consisting of sampling of the best of Canadian cartography for exhibition at the

ICA meetings.  The Company contributed samples to 13 National Exhibits between 1972 and 2003.  On three occasions, the Company contributed more than one map to an exhibit.  In 1980, at the 10^th ICA Conference held in Tokyo, the Company contributed two maps to a 21-map Canadian National Exhibit.  A list of the Company’s contributions to the National Exhibits can be viewed at www.canmap.com/recognition.htm.

In 1994 the Canadian Cartographic Association bestowed an Award of Distinction on the Principal for his exceptional contribution to professional cartography.

The computer processing era
The Company started converting to computer processing in the early 1990s and published its first digitally produced map of the West Coast Trail, Vancouver Island, in 1998 for Parks Canada Pacific Rim National Park.       

Computers and computer output devices were in use for some considerable time.  However, the system was of no use to the Company, other than for mathematical manipulation, because there were no map-size output devices with adequate resolution on the market.  For years, the available fast computer systems were harnessed to plotters which simulated the traditional hand-drafting operations.  The end results were useable as engineering drawings but they were completely inadequate for the Company’s kind of mapmaking.

The computer technology finally became useful to us with the release of MicroStation, a sophisticated mapping program, and the arrival of the large format scanner/plotter with a resolution of 1/2000^th of an inch.  Both  the program and the plotter were marketed by

the Intergraph Company of Alabama.  Since the resolution of the plotter was just adequate for our work, we started building our computer system with the Intergraph mapping hardware and software.  Since then the system went through several transformations and can be reviewed at www.canmap.com/our_resources.htm.

The Company continued to update or modify its existing maps using its well designed and perfected analogue methods, however, any new maps after 1998 were created by digital processing.  At the start of the computer mapping era, the computers first served to provide the phototypesetting component while the rest of the map image was created using the traditional analogue processes.  Subsequently, the whole map imagery was created digitally, converted to negatives which were then converted to printing plates from which the final paper maps were printed on offset presses in printing shop operations.  In the next stage of the development, the digital image was downloaded directly onto a printing plate without the intermediate photomechanical processing.  In the last stage of this conversion to computer processing, a digital image is downloaded to in-house printing devices, special printers and plotters, and copies are run off on demand.  The Company’s last two publications were produced by this process.  The first of these publications, in 2000, was a 180-page tree distribution atlas of which 1000 copies were printed between 2000 and 2007. The second project was the Green Electricity Resources of British Columbia, a 33”x 68” wall map published in 2002 of which about 3,500 copies were printed for the publication event and during the following years.

continued ............