I know someone out there can help me with this.

The other day I got this PDF file of the Naperville Township map from the DuPage Election Commission. My little project is to take this map and generate one of those color-shaded maps that we saw for the country after last November's elections, only precinct-by-precinct.

The basic idea is to start with a map in which each precinct is a different color, calculate the desired color for each precinct based on voting results and then map each precinct to the calculated color. Easy, right?

I found a tool that can map colors inside of a GIF (it's called gifsicle, BTW). I was able to turn the PDF into a GIF (and even cleaned out some of the various colors that just confuse things, at least for this project). I can get the raw vote data, and can easily generate a script to map each precinct's color into whatever the voting numbers indicate.

What I can't seem to do is figure out how to paint each of the different precincts a different color in my starting point map. I thought to use RGB patterns (say, <255,255,1> for Precinct 1, <255,255,2> for 2, etc), but for some reason I couldn't get the colors to work right. So far I've just used Paint (lame, I know, but I do zero graphics stuff - ever).

So how can I do it? Anybody? Please email me the answer. Thanks so much!