First off, I have no formal cartography training – I have only read a couple books and some related websites and studied other people’s maps. Some of the things I’ve done are frowned-upon by those with more formal training and I will endevour to fix as much of that as I can over time. The positioning of labels relative to their related symbols are one example.
I get maps printed at The UPS Store. I think most other shipping/office supply stores can probably do it too. I have had several reports that FedEx Office will not print them “because they are copyrighted” which is pretty stupid. Right next to my copyright notice it says “Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License” and that grants everyone the right to copy, print, and distribute the maps as much as they want. Besides, almost everything is copyrighted even if there is no copyright notice and they will probably print that stuff without objection. The folks at FedEx Office seem to know enough to be dangerous but not enough to be useful.
Maps are targeted at 1:24000 scale unless otherwise stated. I don’t put that figure on the map itself because the details of how it is printed will affect what you actually get. In any case there is a scale bar on each page.
The maps have latitude & longitude coordinates in black and UTM coordinates in blue printed around the outer edge. There is typically also a box showing latitude & longitude for any trail heads on that page. Latitude & longitude are expressed using the WGS84 datum, which is probably the default for most GPS receivers.
Not all roads are shown. I typically include just those that cross the trail or might be useful in accessing the trail and surrounding area. The data comes from state & federal sources. I haven’t personally checked every road to ensure it is categorized correctly (paved/unpaved/high-clearance).
Each page in a multipage set will have thin orange lines showing how adjacent pages overlap the one you’re looking at.
I create the maps using QGIS. It’s a great piece of Free Software but it’s a full-blown GIS rather than being targeted at just making trail maps so there are many features I don’t need or use and a long learning curve.
Until Nov 2023 the base layer used was scans of the ancient USGS topo maps. The result was rather ugly but generally usable. In Nov 2023 I switched to a new base that I created from newer USGS digital data. The new base has a much cleaner, less cluttered appearance and should be much easier to read. It’s certainly nicer to look at. The new maps are rendered with “hill shading”, which adds a shadow effect to the terrain and looks nice but I wonder if it hurts legibility. I may go back to the “flat” look after I get some experience using these in the field. Send me feedback if you have good reasons to go one way or the other.
Another change permitted by the new base layer is that maps are now being rendered at 200 dots per inch with jpeg compression at 70% quality. Previously, I had to use 300 dots per inch and lossless compression to avoid compromising the already-bad visual quality. This change typically reduces file size to just 25-33% of previous sizes. I can see trivial degradation in the printed output only when using a magnifying glass so that seems like an easy win.
The Compulsive Hiker 