Cartograph Map Poster (SVG + PDF from OpenStreetMap)

What it is for

A city map poster is a classic gift: the streets of the town where you met, grew up or ran your first marathon, printed large and framed. This tool draws such a poster from real OpenStreetMap data and returns two print files: a true-size SVG for design software and a vector PDF that any print shop accepts.

You bring the data. Upload an extract of your area – an .osm file exported from openstreetmap.org, an .osm.pbf from Geofabrik or BBBike, or GeoJSON with OSM tags – or leave the file field empty to use the built-in Vaduz sample. The tool never queries a map server, so what you get is exactly what is in your file.

It draws streets by class, footpaths and cycleways, railways, rivers and lakes, parks and woods, and optionally buildings. It does not draw street names, contour lines or hill shading, and coastlines appear as lines because the sea area is not built from them.

Worked example

With the Vaduz sample, centre 47.1393, 9.5215, an area half-width of 1,500 m, paper 50 × 70 cm portrait and the Terracotta style, the tool returned:

• Paper: 50 × 70 cm portrait
• Scale at the centre: 1 : 6,818
• Area shown: 3.00 × 3.60 km
• Features drawn: 2,317 – of them 1,113 paths, 584 service roads, 240 streets, 49 secondary and 49 primary roads, 187 parks, 43 woods, 22 lakes and riverbanks, 25 streams and 5 river segments.

The map frame is 3 km wide because the half-width is 1.5 km; it is 3.6 km tall because the frame on 50 × 70 cm paper is taller than wide. Switching to a 30 × 30 cm square with a round frame, the Midnight style, buildings on and 1,000 m half-width gave 1 : 9,259, 2.00 × 2.00 km and 2,515 features, 1,040 of them buildings.

How to read the result

The preview shows the poster exactly as the files draw it. Scale at the centre tells you how many centimetres on the ground one centimetre on paper stands for; it is exact at the centre and changes very slightly towards the edges (Web Mercator). Area shown is the ground size of the map frame. The table Features drawn per layer counts the features that are at least partly inside the frame – useful to see whether your extract really covers the area.

Download the PDF for printing and the SVG for editing. Both carry the line “© OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL”, which the licence requires on every map you publish or sell.

Tips and common mistakes

• If Features drawn is very low, your centre is outside the extract. Leave Poster centre empty to use the middle of the file.
• Larger areas need thinner lines: the tool already thins them as the half-width grows, and Line width factor fine-tunes it.
• Buildings make posters dense; they suit half-widths up to about 1.5 km and the Midnight or Mono styles.
• Print at actual size. “Fit to page” shrinks the frame and changes the scale.
• Titles in Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic and Devanagari are embedded in the PDF; Chinese, Japanese and Korean titles appear in the SVG only for now.
• Country-size PBF files are slow to upload; cut out your town first, for example with osmium extract.

FAQ

May I sell posters made with this tool?

Yes, as long as the OpenStreetMap attribution stays on the poster. Under the ODbL a printed map is a “produced work”; the share-alike terms apply to databases, not to the print. The six styles are original and free to use.

Why are there no street names?

The poster style is deliberately label-free. Names would need font metrics and collision handling per street; you can add your own text in a design program using the SVG.

What does the area half-width mean?

It is the ground distance from the centre to the left and right edge of the map frame. 1,000 m shows a 2 km wide area; the height follows from the paper shape.

Is my file uploaded?

On this tool page it is sent to the server like every tool upload; the generated poster files are deleted after about two hours. In the Cartograph app the same engine runs entirely in your browser.