Michael Lu's Blog

Grad school…remember the dreaded time-consuming and painstaking figure grounds that had to be manually traced in CAD? Nope there is an easier way. Use Maperative and export to Adobe Illustrator. I ran across a method of streamlining this process so I felt compelled to share. Spend more time designing and less time with context maps.
For full article : http://braincrunch.tumblr.com/post/9947074703/maperitive-tutorial-generating-osm-map-for-adobe

STEP 1. Download Maperative for free here: http://maperitive.net. Save to desktop and unzip. Run run Maperitive.exe (on Windows) or Maperitive.sh (on Linux/Mac).
STEP 2. Get Map/Download OSM Data: Visit: http://www.openstreetmap.org/ . Search for a location. I will choose Phoenix, AZ

STEP 3. Export Data: Click on Export data on bottom left side of openstreetmap. Save file to desktop. File name is map.osm.

STEP 4: Open with Maperative. Launch Maperative. Choose File>Open Map Sources. Choose map.osm.

STEP 5: Turn off Web map. Click the star icon off for Web map located on bottom left of screen. Then Choose Tools> Export to SVG (For Adobe Illustrator). Note the location of the illustrator export file (Found on the bottom command line screen)

STEP 6: Launch Adobe Illustrator. Click File> Open> Navigate to the file called “output” and open.

STEP 7: In Illustrator, color vector lines as required.