There are many ways to draw a map.

  • ArcGIS, QGIS
    With ArcGIS and QGIS, firstly we need a shapefile of target area.
  • Adobe Illustrator
    With the MapPublisher plug-in, people can draw high resolution maps. Also, it can be saved as PDF, JPEG or TIF.
  • R
    If you don’t know anything about programming, you can also follow this tutorial. Mapping with R is pretty friendly. Users can export maps as PDF or PNG.

Install R

Firstly, download and install R environment for your machine. Windows, Mac.

RStudio is a set of integrated tools designed to help you be more productive with R. download

Install ggmap

ggmap makes it easy to retrieve raster map tiles from popular online mapping services like Google Maps, OpenStreetMap, Stamen Maps.

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if(!requireNamespace("devtools")) install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("dkahle/ggmap", ref = "tidyup")

Here we use Stamen Maps and Google Maps as an example.

Examples

Use ggmap package. 

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library(ggmap)

Stamen Maps

With Stamen Maps, there are many themes to choose from. “Toner” is for high-contrast B+W (black and white) map, with six flavors: standard toner, hybrid, labels, lines, background, and lite. “Terrain” suits terrain maps, featuring hill shading and natural vegetation colors, with four flavors: standard terrain, labels, lines, and background. Moreover, there are “Watercolor”, “Burning Map” and so forth.
Draw a map of China: 

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china <- c(left = 72, bottom = 15, right = 135, top = 60) # coordinates

map_china <- get_stamenmap(china, zoom = 4, maptype = "toner-lite") #get tiles from net

ggmap(map_china) #draw the map

Map of China

But the problem for Stamen Maps is not so detailed. If we set zoom = 12, the map is blurring. 

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center <- c(left = 121.424063, bottom = 31.195848, right = 121.490231, top = 31.236447)

map_center <- get_stamenmap(center, zoom = 12, maptype = "toner-lite")

ggmap(map_center)

Map of Shanghai Center

So we use Google Map to draw maps with big zoom levels.

Google Maps

The benifit of Google is we don’t need to specify coordinates manully. We can put country or city names as we search them in Google Maps. 

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map <- get_map(location = 'Zhangjiang', zoom = 10)
ggmap(map)

Map of Shanghai Center

Others

With R and ggmap there are much more fancy feathres can be plotted in maps. For instance, points, polygons, choropleth map and also with external data.

References

[1] GitHub | A package for plotting maps in R with ggplot2
[2] Eric C. Anderson | Making Maps with R
[3] kimgilbert | Making Maps with R