Free Geography Tools

One drawback of Google Maps is that it doesn’t give you position data for a particular spot, like latitude/longitude or UTM coordinates, unless you jump through some hoops. But I’ve found a site that makes determining point coordinates easy, and even allows you to export those coordinates into a file.

Here’s a screenshot of the DigiPoint (Points Digitalization) website:

It has the standard Google Maps view on the right, along with the Map/Satellite/Hybrid buttons, but there are additional windows and toolbars. Click on any point on the map, and a green position marker will appear on the map; its position (latitude and longitude) will appear in the pane on the left. You can adjust the size and type of new markers by using the drop-down to the right of “Symbol” on the toolbar. To remove a point, make sure the “Delete Node when click map” box is checked, then click on the map marker to remove it from the map, though its position will remain in the pane list; to clear out both the markers and text, click on “New”. Enter text into the “Name” box before clicking, and the name will be entered into the pane along with coordinates, with a number in brackets appended (if no text is in the Name box, only a number in brackets will appear). Unlike Google Earth, these positions appear to be quite accurate, within a few feet of the true positions. You can also turn off the “Scale Bar”, “Overview Map” or “Zoom/Pan” Google Maps features by unchecking the boxes to the right of “Map Controls”.

If that’s not enough, you can also export the position data into a number of text formats: text (TXT), AutoCad (DXF), comma-separated values (CSV), BLN (never heard of it!) and tab-delimited (TAB). Just click on the corresponding button on the toolbar, and a new window will open up containing the appropriate text; copy it into a text editor, edit it as needed, and save it with the appropriate file extension for that file type. Although the data in the left pane will always be in latitude/longitude, the exported data will be in the format designated in the toolbar to the left of “Output”; UTM is the default, but you can select latitude and longitude from the drop-down.It looks like the site author is planning to add options to create KML, Shape and GPX files from this page as well, but they’re currently inoperative. But you can always save this position data in CSV format, then use programs like GPSBabel or CSV2KML to convert them to GPX or KML format, or use DNRGarmin to convert it to a point shapefile.