The aim My current aim is to create a series of (heavily) stylized diagrams and maps. I'm not very familiar with any GIS software, so my weapon of choice would be to use illustrator for creating the maps (the source would be from a GIS system, so the input would be among the lines of a shapefile and is negiotiable).
The problem So far so good, and I do not forsee any problems in this. The main question: how can the workflow from illustrator to any kind of tileserver with the goal to be displayed in google maps / Openlayers or something alike be achieved as painless as possible?
Vector vs Pixels: My idea now is to use a tileserver, because I think rasterizing the images will be easier then to import the styles from illustrator back to a GIS server. However, vectorized data might mean a lot less data to transfer and a better user experience.
Also: Would you recommend this workflow? Am I going about this the wrong way?
Your ideas and suggestions are highly appreciated.
Best Answer
If your data is dynamic and changes frequently, don't fix your style in rasters. Have you considered using SLD (Styled Layer Descriptor)? There is a cookbook from GeoServer with nice examples here:
http://blog.geoserver.org/2010/04/09/sld-cookbook/
If you don't want to code SLD but need a WYSIWYG editor, there is Styler from OSGeo (though I have not yet worked with it seriously):
http://projects.opengeo.org/styler/