This is probably the best general map making tool and it is free, thanks to the folks at U. Hawaii.

http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/gmt/

Go to this site to see the complete set of info about GMT.

GMT - The Generic Mapping Tools

GMT is developed and maintained by Paul Wessel and Walter H. F. Smith.

Where is GMT used?

GMT is used all over the world. The yellow dots show the location of the 600+ institutions who have mailed in the GMT registration form, representing about 6000 GMT users. To add your dot, fill out the registration form below!

gmt/gmt_faq.htmlgmt/gmt_faq.htmlFrequently Asked Questions about GMT.

Online GMT Services

Click HERE for access to the complete Online GMT Technical Reference and Cookbook, GMT Tutorial, and GMT Unix Man Pages.

GMT Examples

Click HERE to see examples of GMT output.

Cannot find the answer to a question in the documentation?

We have a world-wide mailinglist for use by GMT users. If you send mail to gmthelp it will reach ~500 subscribed GMT users, one of which is likely to know the solution to your problem. To add yourself to this mailinglist (which is maintained by the listserver program), you must send mail to the listserver with a 1-line message. E.g., if your name is John Smith then send

There is a second mailinglist that is only used by the GMT developers to broadcast infrequent messages regarding bug fixes and updates. Users cannot post to this mailinglist. To stay informed of new developments, send mail to the listserver replacing gmthelp with gmtgroup in the message example above. Note: the GMT developers monitor both lists and are aware of all submissions allthough they may not respond personally to each message.

Availability of GMT source code

The GMT package is available via anonymous ftp from several servers; they all contain the same files as the main server in Hawaii. Because of file sizes you are strongly encouraged to use the server closest to you: http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/cgi-bin/imagemap/gmt/gmt/images/gmt_hitmap.maphttp://www.soest.hawaii.edu/cgi-bin/imagemap/gmt/gmt/images/gmt_hitmap.map

1. SOEST, Dept of Geology & Geophysics, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA. Serving the Pacific Rim
2. NOAA, Lab for Satellite Altimetry, Silver Spring, Maryland, USA. Serving North America
3. IAG-USP, Dept of Geophysics, Sao Paulo, Brazil. Serving South America
4. AFG, Institute for Geology, Oslo, Norway. Serving Europe
5. Charles Sturt U, Albury, Australia. Serving Australia
6. ISV, Sapporo, Japan. Serving Asia

GMT requires the Unidata netCDF library, version 3.4 or higher. For Win32 users, a precompiled version of netCDF for Win32 including a DLL library is also available. [Both this library and a precompiled set of GMT binaries for Win32 are available from the ftp sites above].

• Because of the size of the archives (the entire GMT package is ~50 Mb with bzip2), we strongly recommend that you copy our installation cshell script install_gmt which automates the ftp process, prepares the makefiles, compiles, and installs all necessary and optional modules for you.
• The latest compressed tar archives for version 3.1 were created Nov 23, 1998. The document BUGS discusses problems encountered since the creation of the archive - use this information to temporarily fix these problems.
• Version 3.1 has caused a few cases of backward incompability with the previous version 3.0. The document INCOMPATIBILITIES discusses these changes so you may modify your custom scripts.
• The document LATEST discusses programs and useful scripts added to the ftp site since the release of the current GMT version.
• The web-page for the old GMT 3.0 has moved here.