A three-in-one tool for cartographic generalization with the new version of CartAGen

Abstract. The lack of open and free tools for cartographic generalisation restricts the use of generalization techniques to National Mapping Agencies that can afford the development of custom processes based on software such as ArcGIS. For the others, whether they are students, researchers, independent cartographers or data journalists, the release of the version 1.0 of the CartAGen library can be a solution. CartAGen can be seen as a three-in-one tool. It provides first an open Python library that is complementary to Shapely and GeoPandas libraries to build automated generalisation scripts. Then, CartAGen is now (2) a QGIS plugin that can be used to generalise QGIS layers with many different algorithms that can also be included in a model builder. Finally, we provide (3) several Python notebooks that can be used as tutorials to discover the challenges of map generalisation, and how the library can be used. A significant effort has been made to provide documentation that is aimed at both novice and trained cartographers.