Draw your own route shape

The built-in shapes – Heart, Star, Circle, Square, Triangle, Arrow and Zigzag – are a good start. For initials, an animal or your club logo, draw the shape yourself.

Draw with one stroke

1. Open the Route art tab with a map loaded (for example the Vaduz sample).
2. Press the pen button Draw your own shape in the small tool column at the top of the preview. The button stays highlighted while drawing mode is on.
3. Draw the outline on the map in one stroke: press, move, release. On a touch screen, draw with one finger.

When you lift the pointer, drawing mode ends. Cartograph thins the stroke to at most about 300 points, centres it on its own middle and sets Shape width to the size you drew. The Shape list now shows Your own drawing, and the route is snapped right away.

Keep the stroke simple. Streets only allow so much detail: corners smaller than a block will be cut, and long thin details merge with the street next to them.

Fit it to the streets

Your drawing behaves like any built-in shape:

• drag it to another part of town,
• change Shape width or use the mouse wheel,
• turn it with Rotation until its long lines follow main streets.

Watch Shape covered within 25 m while you try – it goes up when the drawing sits well on the street grid. A higher Stay-on-shape weight helps when the route takes shortcuts across the drawing.

Tips for good GPS art

• Grid-like districts make straight lines and sharp corners easy; old town centres suit round shapes.
• Rivers and railways have few crossings. If the route makes long detours, move the shape so that it does not cross them often.
• Choose By bike only where one-way streets are not a problem for your shape; on foot you have more freedom.
• Undo (Ctrl+Z) brings back the previous shape if a stroke did not work out.

Save it

The drawing is part of the project, so it is saved in this browser and in project files. Share links include it too – shapes are not personal data – but not your map file.

Next: find a fair meeting point.