In partnership with Mattys Consulting , our sister site Mapping-Tools.com is now able to offer a range of MapPoint printing services. These include laminated maps, Adobe PDF documents, and TIFF bitmap images. However, what is probably of greatest interest to GeoWeb Guru readers, is the "MapCruncher map tile" option. This can be used to draw MapPoint maps as tile layers on a Bing Maps map.

Most if not all online mapping services have problems when drawing shaded area (choropleth) maps. These are easy with MapPoint's Data Import Wizard and Shaded Area map option. Mattys Consulting can "print" a choropleth map and create MapCruncher tiles for display in Bing Maps, like this:

This example uses US Census Bureau population data to plot the percentage increase (or decrease) in population from June 2007 to June 2008 for ALL counties in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana. The live Bing Maps implementation is fully interactive and can be zoomed for better analysis. Note that MapPoint text labels can be imported (eg. the county names). Although the sample overlay is fully opaque, transparency can also be applied.

Further information and pricing details can be found at http://www.mapping-tools.com/print/printing.shtml .