I have to admit, I am not a big fan of the North American data layer for doing local maps. I really miss the United States data that was available for previous versions of the MapStudio. The layers were more straight forward and easier to work up in Illustrator. Transportation layers had different line weights for streets, major highways and interstates. That made it very easy to style them. The new version puts a all streets into two sets of lines layered on top of each other, a gray one with white on top with no easy way to apply various line widths to different street types. The labels are also hard to work with. Type is broken up when it is on curves and all the labels have a white outlined layer behind it. It now takes longer to create simple maps for the paper. I hope there will be some thought to how we in the newspaper biz need to do our work. A major part of of it is still created for print and the maps we create and download need to be easily styled to our own graphic palettes. Any one else having these concerns. For all the new bells and whistles in the new version it lakes some of the mapping for print logic built into version 3.
