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?
June 28th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
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
June 29th, 2008 at 11:12 am
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!
June 29th, 2008 at 11:19 am
Dylan:
To me that looks like a violation of “I also donβt want to spend all day cropping and fighting with tools.” π
And thanks! Just finishing packing now (almost missed the marshmallows!) π
June 30th, 2008 at 2:33 am
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.
June 30th, 2008 at 9:18 am
I hope you check out the AMC online map http://www.outdoors.org/publications/books/wmg/wmgonline.cfm
June 30th, 2008 at 10:50 am
Adobe Illustrator will tile large images on what ever paper size you desire.