NOAA recently announced plans to sunset the production of paper charts starting in 2020, with no new edition paper charts available after January 2025.
Commercial ship crews saw this shift coming, but the announcement created a backlash with recreational boaters.
With the overlap and many scales, the original raster chart set has a great deal of duplication. It takes a lot of work to find and update any feature. If a navigation buoy is repositioned, for instance, its new location has to be marked on all the charts where it appears—at all scales and accounting for all overlaps.
Esri Industry Expert Steve Snow digs deeper into the past, present and future of Charting in this ArcGIS Blog.
