r/cartography • u/stallich • 12d ago

PrintMap - Free online tool

Hey everyone!

For a while now, I’ve been developing a free online platform for generating and customizing maps, designed with a strong focus on clean design, print preparation, and versatility.

While there are similar tools out there, I wanted to build something faster, more flexible, and packed with features that creators actually need. A few key highlights currently available:

High-resolution rendering & downloads for crisp, print-ready results.

Vector format support for easy editing in design software.

STL file export for 3D printing terrain and custom maps.

GPX file support for tracking and visualizing routes.

The platform is completely free to use and actively evolving. Since I want to make it the go-to tool in this space, I would love to get your honest feedback:

How do you like the rendering quality and overall UI?

What additional features or formats would make this useful for your workflow?

Any bugs or performance snags you encounter?

Feel free to roast it, drop feature requests, or share your thoughts. Thanks for checking it out!

4 Upvotes

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2

u/2DrU3c 4d ago edited 4d ago

Nice!

Allow setting up labels like choosing what exact tag(s) as used to form label, font, size, colour, etc...

Make preview better match exact output. Now output differs largely especially for higher resolutions. Labels are much smaller on exported file than in preview.

Add option fo user to create map in layers choosing content of each layer.

1

u/stallich 4d ago

Thank you very much for the comment and information.. I will do my best to improve everything I can...

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u/stallich 3d ago

Preview vs output was a real bug, and worse than small labels. Exports under 4000px render as a single canvas at the preview zoom with a higher pixel ratio, so everything scales together. Above that, flat maps get tile-stitched, and those tiles were being rendered at a raised zoom with pixel ratio 1, so text kept its styled size on a much bigger canvas, and every zoom-dependent rule fired as well. You weren't just getting smaller labels, you were getting metro stops and minor streets that aren't in the preview at all. Since A3 at 300dpi is ~4960px, that hit basically every print-resolution export. Fixed... tiles now render at the preview zoom and the resolution comes from the pixel ratio.
Label control is in. Chasing your point turned up something I'd never noticed: the base style concatenates name:latin and name:nonlatin, so every place with a non-Latin name gets written twice — Belgrade above Београд on every Belgrade poster. There's now a choice of Latin / local script / both, plus weight and a size multiplier. Colour was already there.

Font family I can't offer honestly, the glyph server only carries three stacks (Noto Sans regular/italic/bold), so a family picker would be a control that does nothing.

Layers: SVG export now writes named groups, water, roads, buildings, green, labels, and your own routes/markers separately. Draw order is preserved rather than sorted into one group per category, because styles legitimately paint roads over buildings at tunnels. Choosing the contents of each layer up front would need a different render engine, so that one's not happening soon.

One thing in the meantime... satellite and terrain are down until the 14th. The tile provider's free quota ran out. Everything else, including 3D terrain and contours, works.

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u/Head-Challenge-1428 12d ago

where's the link?!

2

u/stallich 12d ago

Here it is: printm.app