Your first city map poster

Cartograph draws posters from OpenStreetMap data: streets by class, footpaths, railways, rivers and lakes, parks and woods, and – if you like – every building. This tutorial uses the built-in Vaduz sample, so you can follow it without a map file of your own.

Open the sample poster

1. Open the File menu and choose New from template….
2. Pick Vaduz on paper. The Poster tab opens with a cream A3 poster of Vaduz, Liechtenstein.

The big picture on the left is the real poster at reduced size. The panel on the right holds every setting, from top to bottom: Map data, Area, Paper, Style, Text, Poster facts and Download.

Choose the area

The Centre field holds the middle of the map. You can type a coordinate in almost any format – 47.1393, 9.5215, 47°08′N 9°31′E, UTM or a plus code – or simply drag the map in the preview. The mouse wheel shows more or less of the town.

Area half-width is the ground distance from the centre to the left and right edges of the map frame. 1,200 m gives a neighbourhood, 3,000 m a whole small town. Poster facts below tells you the scale at the centre (for example 1 : 9,183 on A3) and the size of the area shown in kilometres.

With the keyboard, click once into the preview (or Tab to it) and use the arrow keys to move, plus and minus to zoom; Shift makes the steps larger.

Pick paper and frame

Under Paper:

• Paper size offers A4, A3, A2, 30 × 40 cm, 50 × 70 cm, US Letter and a 30 × 30 cm square.
• Orientation switches between portrait and landscape.
• Map frame draws the map in a Rectangle or a Circle.

Every change redraws the preview at once, and every change can be undone with the undo arrow or Ctrl+Z.

Choose a style and the layers

The six colour styles under Style are original Cartograph palettes: Paper, Midnight, Blueprint, Terracotta, Mono and Forest. Use the arrow keys to move through them when one has focus.

The check boxes switch layers on and off: Roads, Footpaths and cycleways, Railways and trams, Rivers and lakes, Parks and woods and Buildings. Buildings make dense, detailed posters; they look best with the Midnight and Mono styles. Line width makes every line thicker or thinner – useful for large paper or when you show a big area.

Write the text

Under Text, Show the text band adds the band below the map. Type your Title and Subtitle, and keep Print the centre coordinates on if you like the small coordinate line. The attribution “© OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL” is always printed in the bottom corner – it is required by the OpenStreetMap licence and Cartograph never leaves it out.

Titles in Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic and Devanagari script are embedded correctly in the PDF.

Download the poster

Under Download:

• Download PDF gives a vector PDF at true paper size. Print it at 100 % (actual size).
• Download SVG gives a true-size SVG for design programs.
• Download PNG gives a 150 dpi image; the Export menu also offers 300 dpi.

Your project saves itself in this browser. You find it again under File → Recent projects….

Next: use your own OpenStreetMap data.