Today we released Cartographica 1.7. This will be the last major release for Cartographica, and I want to extend my appreciation to all Cartographica users, past and present. As I sunset Cartographica, I will be monitoring macOS 14 during Apple's beta period and if necessary, will release a bug-fix release for compatibility with macOS 14. If you run into problems with 1.7 with any of the supported operating systems (macOS 11.7+), please report bugs.

Information about many of the largest changes are available in previous postings here:

Formal release notes are on the macgis.com Release Notes, but here are the highlights:

• Major updates to the GDAL and PROJ libraries that we use for file import/export and CRS management
• Updates to the georeferencing workflow
• bug fixes
• Raster Reprojection
• Exported Layer TIFF files now default to JEPG for better compression
• Import of WKT geometry from CSV files

File format changes

Due to changes in macOS 14, EPS files will not be supported in future versions of macOS. For consistency, I have removed support for EPS files for Cartographica as a source of symbols under macOS 14. If you are using macOS 11-14, Cartographica will automatically convert the EPS symbols to TIFF format. If possible, please use PDF files instead, as Cartographica will maintain those in their scalable format.

As indicated in our announcement of 1.6, there are some adjustments to the file formats supported by Cartographica (the current listing of which is in the software and on our site).

As time evolves, there will be formats added and removed based on library requirements, maintenance issues, licensing, or other reasons. If you have a file that is using a format supported by a previous version of Cartographica, but not by the current version, we recommend that you look to see if the data is available in a supported format, or that you translate the format by using Cartographica's internal tools (or the newly-available command-line tools).

Additions

New drivers available in this release:

• OpenFileGDB for Rasters
• NSIDC Sea Ice Concentrations
• NOAA GEOCON/NADCON5

Platform differences

Carried over from the 1.6 release notes, but for people who are upgrading to Apple Silicon, I am repeating this.

The MrSID drivers that we use for the Intel code are not available from Extensis, the current owner of the libraries and patents. We recommend moving away from the MrSID proprietary format and towards other standard formats such as JPEG2000, GeoTIFF, or something otherwise appropriate for your needs.

We realize that the OpenJPEG drivers we're using aren't super efficient for the Intel processors, so for the time being, we are still using the MrSID drivers for reading JPEG 2000 on Intel machines. That's likely to change as I'd like to get the drivers unified across all of the platforms.

Requirement of active maintenance for services and support

As with Cartographica 1.6 (as detailed in Preparing for 1.6 Cartographica continues to require active maintenance for upgrading to the latest version.

As stated in our Sunsetting Cartographica update, anyone with a perpetual license and active maintenance after December 1, 2022 will have access to version 1.7.

Support for services provided by ClueTrust (such as the currently-provided MapBox maps and geocoding) and access to support and versions beyond 1.5.x of Cartographica will require active paid maintenance. Note that as mentioned in Sunsetting Cartographica, these services will not be provided by ClueTrust after December 31, 2023 and will require the user to have their own API key in order to access live maps or geocoding.

OS compatibility

Cartographica 1.7 supports macOS 11.7+, 12.6+, and 13.4+