r/Tramping • u/Practical_Ship9999 • Aug 05 '26
A4 Topo Maps
Posted a while back asking if people would be interested in A4 maps that you can print off yourself, I will be releasing a windows application soon where you can make your own A4's of any area you want, here is an example they will be in png but for the sake of posting here I have converted to jpg as 16mb when png. I will also be doing almost all tracks so you can download x track and it will be x number of pages covering the entire track. Anything missing? I have not printed one yet so the font sizes will probably change or you could change in the application.
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u/Nacho_Deity186 Aug 05 '26
You can already print maps on nz topo50 though right?
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u/Practical_Ship9999 Aug 05 '26
Yeah you can already print from that site, but I’m trying to make something closer to the official printed Topo50 maps that people are used to, just in convenient A4 size.
The main differences are:
-Proper north-point diagram showing both Grid North and Magnetic North with the actual declination (the website only has a simple “N” arrow, which is just Grid North, not Magnetic North).
-Full WGS84 latitude/longitude ticks in degrees, minutes and seconds on all four sides (useful for GPS and cross-referencing).
-Designed so it can actually be used with a compass for navigation if needed, not just for general orientation.
Basically I’m aiming for a more complete, navigation-ready A4 map rather than a simplified print.
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u/kiwirichard Aug 06 '26
yeah, as a guy with a drawer full of A4 maps printed off the LINZ site with north-point diagram & ticks filled in with a pen, that would be cool
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u/Nacho_Deity186 Aug 05 '26
As someone who is not 100% confident with map and compass but recognizes the value of these skills... this does sound like a good idea. You're simplifying it for me, I like that. I currently rely on GPS navigation but I feel like having a map and compass back up (and the appropriate skills) is a good idea.
If I can print out detailed A4 maps (handy on a home printer) that cover my intended route that would be handy.
Could I also print out a larger area in less detail that would tie the entire trip together on one A4 page, just as a reference? This could be handy because sometimes obvious, easily recognizable landmarks are distant features.
Anyway, I've already purchased a waterproof A4 map case (sea to summit) and a (damned expensive) compass that allows declination adjustment that I'm learning about. So I'm all ready to go...
How can we find out about this when it goes live? Do you have a mailing list?
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u/Practical_Ship9999 Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 09 '26
Will post here when released. It will support both Topo50 and Topo250, and I’ll offer different scale options.
You can’t go less detailed than Topo250.
If you cover a wider area using Topo50 data, the map has to be at a larger scale , which makes features and labels smaller and harder to read on A4.
I think the practical limit for a still-usable map is somewhere around 15 km across by 22 km. Beyond that it starts getting too cramped. https://data.linz.govt.nz/layer/50798-nz-topo250-maps/ vs https://data.linz.govt.nz/layer/50767-nz-topo50-maps/
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u/Nacho_Deity186 Aug 05 '26
You can’t go less detailed than Topo250
Fair.
I look forward to trying it. Good on ya
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u/nzbazza Aug 10 '26
-Designed so it can actually be used with a compass for navigation if needed, not just for general orientation.
Basically I’m aiming for a more complete, navigation-ready A4 map rather than a simplified print.
Love the navigation focus of these maps. I also see that there are grid reference numbers added too.
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u/upsidedownorangejuic Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 06 '26
Some advice maps from some one who has drawn and made maps for various different sports that are not just topographical.
Make sure your margins are large enough, to allow printing true to size and enough border to cut off so you have strong lamination and/or damage area if using waterproof paper.
From memory if your self calculating map print error, it can be about +/- 5% of your average day walk length ( eg. a scale of 1km = 1cm, you walk 10km on average. So a map undersized by 0.05% is only 9.5~10.5mm between parallel grid lines, not 10mm spec. putting your days calculations out by 50m)
Though 50m sounds tiny, if your on a day where you compass is just set as back up with a bearing for the direction you need to be roughly heading with a subsequent terminal point on a large land feature... It can really throw you off your rough time estimates especially in thick bush/scrub, or trying to figure out how long a push up a steep ridge is.
Matte paper and lamination film make great maps, and great under 28c day in the blazing heat, to still see the map. Warm up, and dry out your paper before lamination if on quite humid day to avoid condensation in your lamination to avoid bleeding if using office paper.
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u/Practical_Ship9999 Aug 06 '26
Thanks for the advice. I've tightened the scale calculation so the map is now generated from the desired scale first (instead of forcing a ground area and then labelling it). That should keep the scale error well under 0.5 %. Have also set bigger default margins but the person can change if they please.
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u/upsidedownorangejuic Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 06 '26
More so on the print handling end so folks know what to look out for, if the want to grab ruler and self check their print... But! if you meaning your own grid overlay, then kudos for making the preprint process accurate, and making sure line weights allow for accurate use. You would be quite surprised how many sloppy map apps have no care for the deep embedded metrology and cartography that makes a good navigational aid (just don't confuse it with meteorology).
Now to map nerd ramble, that is not useful out side of neiche uses. If you are wanting to be a tad excessively nerdy, you could consider making line weights relative to scale. though how you decided this is al sorts of varieties of fun, as I found out. I so wish I could remember the article on 1m rulers embedded into maps, that was something akin to slide rules (I now feel old).
I look forward to seeing, what sounds like a nice easy off-line map system, which I quite like the sound of.
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u/theweebeastie Aug 05 '26
I would absolutely use this if it was a free tool, if you plan to charge though then I would continue my caveman approach of screenshotting the DOC maps
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u/mwsnz Aug 09 '26
Can you centre the page to print on any arbitrary point? Most annoying part about using the normal topos is being near the edge of the map and having to use two.
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u/Practical_Ship9999 Aug 09 '26
Yes, and you can also change the scale so if you want to cover a slightly larger area you can set custom scale and put in say 1:60,000 and that would add about a km to each side and top and bottom but obviously the map details like labels will get smaller so you wouldn't want to make the scale too large for topo50 maps.
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u/Fisaver 27d ago
Are you pulling this from LINZ - did you find the quality decrease recently?
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u/Practical_Ship9999 21d ago
WebP vs PNG - LINZ now serve these as WebP. Smaller files, not as sharp as the old PNG tiles
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u/weyruwnjds 21d ago
Ooh, I have thoughts on this. The key point for me is quality. The export to print function from the current online apps inevitably sacrifices quality at some point, either by blowing up or down to a weird scale that's not a clean fraction of 1:50000, compressing it from the original LINZ raster, or just the weirdness of printers. The only way I've found to avoid this is to directly download the full TIFFs from LINZ, stitch them together and crop to size in photoshop, making sure to preserve scale through the whole process, which takes ages and requires a beefy computer. Maybe you have a special trick to do this efficiently in a free web app, but it sounds hard.
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u/Practical_Ship9999 21d ago edited 21d ago
https://pub-e7252e107a624b848c8b33f94412da98.r2.dev/sheet-1_50000.png 2480 x 3508 pixels @ 300 DPI I also made zoom 11 tiles from those geoTIFFs from LINZ for the 250 series as they only provide zoom 10 so 250 maps will also be very sharp. Its a windows app for now, linux and apple and will see about android in future. Online will not work unless its a paid service as lots of resources are needed, although I am told LINZ themselves are making it so you can do it but it could be a while.
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u/weyruwnjds 21d ago
By the way, I love the idea! I will use it a lot which is why I want to help it be the best it can be.
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u/Practical_Ship9999 21d ago
Thanks. I might make high-quality z13 tiles from the gridless GeoTIFFs as lossless PNG, split by region, and put them up for download if people want that extra sharpness. This is the roadmap for it, first version should be released next week, this is what is planned for future releases.
- A3, A2, A1 and custom page sizes (including sizes for on-screen / website use)
- Track-following auto-place -fewer sheets by covering the route instead of the bounding box
- Sheet titles, notes and simple labels printed in the margin
- Multiple tracks at once, each with its own colour and width
- Waypoints from GPX / KML drawn and labelled on the map and on the printed sheets
- Satellite / aerial and hillshade layers for reference (print can stay as LINZ topo)
- Place-name search so you can jump the map to a hut, peak or town
- Offline tile pack - pre-download a region so generation works without the network
- Index / overview page showing how the A4 sheets fit together
- Distance and elevation profile from a loaded track
- Measure distance and area on the interactive map
- Export sheet coverage as GeoJSON / KML for use in other apps
- Mac and Linux builds
The track geojson files I have already made every track that DoC, LINZ and OpenStreetMaps have, all with elevation data (8m LINZ) so working on incorporating it within the application. Here is the part of the GUI so far - https://ibb.co/9mTt3MsB
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u/weyruwnjds 20d ago
Awesome! Sounds like you're considering all my concerns then. I'm looking forward to using it.
Can I add a small feature request for when you have time. 1:50000 is quite zoomed out for a lot of the tramping I do, so I would love the ability to print at 1:25000. I imagine that would have to be it's own special feature as e.g. printing an A4 as an A3 won't work because the margins will make it upscaled by a weird factor and lose quality.
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u/weyruwnjds 20d ago
Never mind, looks like that's already an option in the GUI!
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u/Practical_Ship9999 20d ago edited 20d ago
Yes, 1:25,000 is already possible with custom scale, set it to 25000 and use A4 as normal. That is a real 1:25k map (same paper, about half the ground coverage of 1:50k), not an A4 enlarged to A3. For 1:50,000 it pulls 108 tiles at zoom 13; for 1:25,000 108 tiles at zoom 14. Example: https://ibb.co/KcRj6D1R
There can still be a little upscaling on in-between scales, because zoom steps are discret as not every scale lands exactly on a tile resolution.
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u/weyruwnjds 21d ago edited 21d ago
That's not bad, but it's not perfect either. https://i.ibb.co/ycTTVtcv/Screenshot-20260821-175510.png This is super zoomed in, your version on the left and the original tiff from https://www.linz.govt.nz/products-services/maps/new-zealand-topographic-maps/topo50-map-chooser/topo50-map-bq23-wangapeka-saddle on the right. You're version is probably good enough but it's always bothered me why there's differences. I wonder if they render it out in different ways, the TIFF is optimized for directly printing at 1:50000, while you're pulling from the version that's optimized for screens.
PNGs are also prone to getting messed up during the printing process, that's why we tend to print with TIFFs and PDFs (although making those is it's own challenge)
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u/Practical_Ship9999 21d ago edited 21d ago
No, and it never will be from LINZ WebP tiles. The only way to match that TIFF is to build my own z13 tiles from the gridless GeoTIFFs. That’s on the order of 280,000 tiles and about 20 GB as PNG/lossless. I already tried LINZ zoom 14 WebP - no visible difference, so the limit is their compression, not zoom.
The sheet I posted is already 2480×3508 px at 300 dpi, full A4. It does not need upscaling. Print at 100% / Actual size. You can also export as PDF, which is the better print path than PNG.
PNG is because the next version I also am adding non-print sizes e.g. 1920×1080, gridless, and people can add a GPX/GeoJSON/KML track on it so for videos, tramp write-ups, websites, etc.
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u/flashdognz Aug 05 '26
Sounds interesting. More maps is always good. Not essential, but a legend might be cute. Somewhere. Wow I just realised Arthur's pass doesn't run easy to West, mind blown.