Skip to content

User guide

The AcadGIS user guide walks through everything you need to build publication‑ready research maps in Python — from loading administrative boundaries by name to composing study‑area figures, thematic maps, terrain and data layers. Everything works through a single import:

import acadgis as agis

New to AcadGIS? Start with Installation and the Quick start, then work through the sections below.

In this guide

  • Boundaries

    Load country, state, district and sub‑district boundaries by name from GADM — no shapefile hunting — with offline bundles and caching.

  • Styled maps

    One‑line styled maps: palettes, themes, north arrows, scale bars, borders, graticules and legends, all publication‑ready by default.

  • Choropleths & name matching

    Join a spreadsheet to boundaries by name — with fuzzy matching for spelling variants — and shade regions by value with standard classification schemes.

  • Study‑area layouts

    The signature country → region → site locator figures, with connectors and the single, two, cascade, series and grid templates.

  • Terrain & relief

    Shaded relief and hypsometric tint from the Copernicus GLO‑30 DEM — no API key — with realistic land‑to‑ocean colouring.

  • Rivers & hydrology

    Add river networks and water bodies from Natural Earth or OpenStreetMap, clean seas and oceans, and DEM‑derived drainage streams.

  • Collected data points

    Plot sampling sites from latitude/longitude, sized or coloured by a measured value as graduated symbols.

  • Decorations

    Fine‑tune every cartographic element — north arrows, scale bars, borders and graticules — with booleans, named styles or option dictionaries.

Where to next