Paper Maps

Would anyone care to share their experiences of getting paper out of OSM? I’ve been having a go at printing “my” AONB in North Yorkshire, UK.

I tried Osmarender but I found that there were lots of straggly ways all around my selected area. I trimmed them with JOSM but it was hard to get a clean line. It also ran for hours to actually render. I thought I could simply edit the final SVG file with Inkscape, but I couldn’t find ways to crop the map and resize it to fit the paper I wanted to use (A3 - 42*29cm or 16.5 *11.6 in). Is there a better way to do this?

I’ve had a bit more success with Kosmos, although it’s still messy. I found that the resulting maps always needed cropping to get clean edges but you can’t actually do this in Kosmos itself (or can you?). Printing conspires against me to get a detailed map on to A3 - if I increase the zoom to get more detail then it simply splits it across more sheets of paper. I tried printing to a “big” sheet of paper in MS XPS Document Writer which worked a bit better but I still couldn’t crop and resize the end result. In the end I exported a big bitmap at a high zoom and then cropped and resized the resulting PNG file using a picture editor (well Powerpoint actually, but it did the job)

I then used a PDF generator (PDF-XChange) to “print” it to PDF and then printed it to a real sheet of A3 using a colour laser printer in work (don’t tell anyone!). I’m just using the default rules at the moment and the end result isn’t bad, especially as I have slope shading working. I will need to tweak the rules to make the map features bigger such as the road widths and village names, but I presume I can do this ok.

I’m happy to tinker with these things but neither seem suitable for an “end user” without the time and inclination to delve deeply into it. Isn’t there anything easier to use apart from the Export feature on osm.org?

A very nice PDF rendering is at http://maposmatic.org/

Did you already have a look at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_on_Paper ?

@MikeN Yes, but cities only

@stephan75 Yes, I looked there first. Lots of dev servers and perl scripts!

Thanks for the suggestions though.

MapOSMatic allows a bounding box also, but the result is currently limited to a map on a single page.

ok thanks, I’ll have a closer look

Just resurrecting this thread.

Maposmatic now lets you select an area using control+drag to frame it nicely. It renders Mapnik images at a fixed zoom=16 but it is rather nice and it’s street index is great. Hopefully it will allow a changeable zoom sometime.

I’ve also been trying Maperitive, which is the successor to Kosmos. It’s still very early days and it has a buggy command line interface, but already it’s showing great potential. It can already produce a high zoomed Mapnik image (Zoom=18) several miles wide. Nice!