Printing Maps; Twin Mountain DRG

So, I’m going camping this week. While camping, I plan to be hiking the White Mountains relatively extensively, from my home base at Lafayette Campground in Franconia Notch.

One of the best part of planning hiking trips is maps. I love maps. I love looking at them, finding things, exploring things. I love having them handy to reference, I love browsing around them.

However, when you’re on a trail, looking at maps on a computer doesn’t work particularly well. As a result, I’m trying to print maps, and finding that it’s a somewhat difficult proposition.

I have DRGs from the libremaps project: These are great. I’m looking at o44071b5, o44071b6, and o44071a6, all downloaded from the Libre Map Project. Unfortunately, I then went to go open c6, only to find that… it’s not available. Argh! I know that it exists: I can check the features that should be on it in the Terraserver DRG WMS, but no Twin Mountain quad.

Oh well. Not a huge deal, just annoying; I’ve got other maps that cover the area. Now the problem is that I can’t figure out how to take a tiff like these and print them over multiple pages on a home printer. Anyone got any tips or tricks on that? Printing on one page is somewhat useful, but not nearly as much as I’d like; I also don’t want to spend all day cropping and fighting with tools. If I have to do that, I’ll just survive with what I’ve got.

I’m going to go out to the local map store and see if they have a nice Atlas for the Whites; if so, I’ll take it. It’s worth it to have a little bit of extra knowledge about a place — and who can’t use more maps?

6 Responses to “Printing Maps; Twin Mountain DRG”

  1. AB Says:

    For the map book, you could consider trying: http://www.blockposters.com/
    (no affiliation, just thought it might fit your needs).
    Also, http://datagateway.nrcs.usda.gov/GatewayHome.html will likely have a county-scale DRG mosaic that can be downloaded in mrsid format for your hiking area…
    AB

  2. dylan Says:

    Hi Chris,

    For custom map production, I usually use GMT (the Generic Mapping Tools). Here is a quick example:

    http://casoilresource.lawr.ucdavis.edu/drupal/node/102

    Making maps from DRG data isn’t hard, just search on the GMT mailing list archives for some ideas. The results are PS/EPS files.

    Have fun camping!

  3. crschmidt Says:

    Dylan:

    To me that looks like a violation of “I also don’t want to spend all day cropping and fighting with tools.” πŸ™‚

    And thanks! Just finishing packing now (almost missed the marshmallows!) πŸ™‚

  4. fvanderbiest Says:

    Hi Chris,

    For easy map printing, MapFish now does a perfect job …
    See for instance http://demo.mapfish.org/mapfishsample/trunk/examples/print/simple.html

    F.

  5. Guido (from Boston) Says:

    I hope you check out the AMC online map http://www.outdoors.org/publications/books/wmg/wmgonline.cfm

  6. JRF Says:

    Adobe Illustrator will tile large images on what ever paper size you desire.