printing NSW topos

[wildwanderer]

How does one go about printing the pdfs on six maps?

They are huge.

[Neo]

Would be sweet if it was easy to print an A4 section to scale!

[Mark F]

Take the file to Officeworks. You can even get it printed on Tyvek for a more robust, waterproof map.

I expect you can print a cutout section using a screen snipper but you end up with a much coarser pixel size compared to printing dirct from the pdf file as screens will give you a raster file of about 100 pixels per inch whereas much of the pdf is vector format so it scales cleanly. Also remember when printing pdfs or screen shots not to allow scaling to fit the page or your scale gets distorted.

[wildwanderer]

Thanks.

Any idea how much it costs to print at Officeworks? I can only see A3 and below on the website.

I'm hoping to get the same scale as the paper version.

Ideally I'd like to cut up several pdf maps, discard what I don't need and then stitch them back together. Then print to paper scale.

But I'm probably being to optimistic about what's possible.

[Neo]

I've been buying from Map World Parramatta recently. NSW topo $16.50 each.
Quick service, if they don't have the original then they will print it (no sat image on the reverse side).

I then do a colour A4 copy of the sections I need and laminate them back to back.

[Huntsman247]

I import the pdfs into photoshop. Mask the edges and join multiple maps. So I'm only seeing what's relevant for me. No margins or irrelevant info. Save as jpeg and print at office works on tyvek. Do it on their website or they will charge you 25 bucks in-store instead of the 10 bucks on the website for a1.
Here's one I just made last week.
I suppose there are other apps you could use that are free if you don't have photoshop.
Particularly useful when your interested in an area where maps join. You don't need to take 4 maps.

[MeanderingFlyFisher]

Would be sweet if it was easy to print an A4 section to scale!

I take a screen shot of around 6x8 squares(experiment with this and scale)then just print it on home basic printer.
I am not tech savvy and I can do it so anybody should be able to.
I then join the bits I want together and clear contact it. The Aldi stuff available in Jan is thin and I find it the best

[Mark F]

Any idea how much it costs to print at Officeworks? I can only see A3 and below on the website.

https://www.officeworks.com.au/shop/off ... Copy/Plans

[Tyreless]

Would be sweet if it was easy to print an A4 section to scale!

Have you tried Tom Brennan's tool: https://maps.ozultimate.com/archive/08_print/.

I find it invaluable.

[wildwanderer]

Thanks everyone. Great suggestions.

Wow tyreless that tool is incredible!
Awesome work Tom Brennan!

I noticed it doesn't create any border. Did you find the edges of the map get chopped off when printing?

When printed how large do you find the detail? Is it the same scale as the published maps?

[Tyreless]

I never notice if any gets chopped off - if it happens it would be so small as to not matter. I don't always print to scale - I rarely measure accurately from it as I use them as a backup to my phone/GPS. Detail looks fine to me, but Tom may chip in with the technical details.

[ChrisJHC]

The GIMP is a (legally) free alternative to Photoshop.
Has 90% of the functionality and will probably be more than enough for what you're looking for.

[ken333]

ImageMagick can convert PDFs to JPGs or PNGs, which can then be cropped and printed with any image editor. ImageMagick requires Ghostscript to to be installed, to convert PDFs. ImageMagick and Ghostscript are both free open source software, and can be downloaded from:
https://imagemagick.org/ and https://www.ghostscript.com/

Make a new folder eg Maps with Windows File Explorer and copy the NSW SIX ETopo pdf map to it. They are about 14 MB is size.
ImageMagick runs in a Command window in Windows. Type run cmd.exe in the Windows search box, to open a cmd window.
Type or copy-paste the following command to convert the pdf to jpg:
magick -density 200 "C:\Maps\SIX_map_1.pdf" "C:\Maps\SIX_map_1_out.jpg"

This will produce a medium resolution JPG file that can cropped and printed using an image editor, such as Paint for Windows. The example I tested produced a jpg file of 27.7 MB and 9023x4046 pixel size. Conversion can be slow, and ImageMagick doesnt show any sign it is working, so wait until the new file appears. For higher resolution, increase the -density value. However, this may produce a very large file, which Paint may not be able to open.
An area of the original file can be extracted from the pdf, so higher resolutions can be achieved, for a selected area of the map.
magick -density 200 -extract 1000x1450+2000+3100 "C:\Maps\SIX_map_1.pdf" "D:\Test\SIX_map_1_out.jpg"

This extracts an image size of 1000x1450 pixels located 2000x3100 pixels from the top-left corner.
Paint can print the image as a PDF file, which can be transferred to another device.

[tom_brennan]

Have you tried Tom Brennan's tool: https://maps.ozultimate.com/archive/08_print/.

I wrote that tool as I got sick of stitching together topo maps!

If you select A4 or A3, in theory the tool will create an image that exactly fills an A4 or A3 sheet of paper at 1:25k scale. (Though that doesn't seem to be exactly working! But should be close enough. Need to look at it...)

If you then want to print at 1:25k scale, the very edges will get cropped. This shouldn't be a problem for most modern printers - it's a few mm off the edge at most. The grid numbers the tool adds are inset by about 1cm, so should not be cut off unless your printer needs more than 1cm around the edges. If this is a problem, most print dialogs have an option to shrink pages to fit.

The main reason I haven't advertised the tool more widely is that (for me anyway) the contours print too faintly. I find that I have to take the resulting image into PhotoShop or similar, and process it a bit to get the contours to print to an acceptable contrast. If you don't have PhotoShop, using Unsharp Mask tool in GIMP or Paint.NET (both free) generally does a pretty good job of improving the contrast.

I have a different set of steps I use, but most of them are to get rid of much of the colour so it doesn't waste my ink!!

I tried building all of this into the tool, as well as exporting to PDF (since most people should be able to print a PDF), but it consumed too much memory and crashes most browsers. Even the compiling of the basic map chews through a fair amount of memory, so some people's computers may not handle it.

[wander]

Have you tried Tom Brennan's tool: https://maps.ozultimate.com/archive/08_print/.

If you select A4 or A3, in theory the tool will create an image that exactly fills an A4 or A3 sheet of paper at 1:25k scale. (Though that doesn't seem to be exactly working! But should be close enough. Need to look at it...)
.

Brilliant tool, but yeah it would be good if it was spot on 1:25.

[tom_brennan]

Brilliant tool, but yeah it would be good if it was spot on 1:25.

Think it's fixed now.