I stayed up WAAY to late last night working on this. Here is what I found. I love the @timtsuga suggestion to use the USGS data, but unfortunately, this doesn’t solve my problem. This only gives me the contours for the land, and not the lake depths. Plus, the lake that I wanted to work on is on the corner of the USGS map, so I would have to merge 4 separate maps together in illustrator, which isn’t a simple process. The other limitation is that the State of Wisconsin cartographer’s office doesn’t have bathymetric (depth contour) maps available in a vector format. So, the closest alternative is flat PDF documents from the Wisconsin DNR. I can import these into Illustrator and then do a live trace on them to get the contour lines, but tons of clean up is necessary. Using a combination of the tutorial that I have listed in the first thread, plus using the flat PDF map documents from the DNR, I should be able to save myself some time. Other states may have this lake depth information available, but I haven’t checked yet.
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