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Peter Edwards Thursday 03 Mar 2022 10:07:39
Brilliant. Thank you. I know they're not the sexiest of new features, but being able to use plotaroute to produce backup printed maps of the route, in case of a technology disaster, is really the only feature I think is sorely missing. It's an incredible value tool. :)
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plotaroute admin Thursday 03 Mar 2022 11:03:00
Hi Peter,
A quick update. We've been doing some investigation into this and we've found a way to force the print process to use 1:25K scale OS maps. However, there are some issues and things to note.
Firstly, the map features will inevitably be a lot smaller, as the 1:25K image is being squeezed onto a page that it isn't naturally designed to fit (see this example using your three peaks route). There will also be limits to how large an area you can feasibly expand the 1:25k maps to on one page. Your three peaks route is probably at the limit.
Secondly, our PDF export may not be able to handle this, so you might need to use the "Print using browser" option. As most browsers have PDF export options these days anyway, this is probably less of an issue.
Let us know what you think about these points.
The automatic selection and mixing of landscape and portrait pages in one print out is much more complicated than it would seem, so this is probably not something that we can do so easily.
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Peter Edwards Sunday 13 Mar 2022 19:02:00
Hi. apologies for the delayed reply - I've been away hiking in the brecon beacons. :)
That example you've provided looks like it would help Colin Bennett, I think, as he was attempting to print his entire route on to a single page in 1:25K.
Unfortunately, for my purpose, I don't think it's very practical to squeeze a route of the size of three peaks to be that small. Having the whole route on one page is just too tiny to make out the detail, especially if the weather conditions are poor and rain is covering the map case.
I also go on significantly longer trips with my local outdoor group that covers much greater distances than this single day route - we have walked the Wainwright Coast to Coast route, the full length of the Pennine Way etc. Long distance paths like these take weeks to walk and really do need to be broken down into stages. I can see that this can be done manually by the user into individual routes for each of the stages, but as I'd also like to have one complete unbroken route for navigation purposes, it is a painful workaround.
I realise that the request certainly does require development work, though I'm not sure why the size of the route needs to be a limitation - rather than specifying the number of pages / stages to break the route into, it would be ideal if the app could work out the minimum number of stages/pages required to fit on 1:25K maps. This is the sort of functionality that comes with products like Memory Map on Windows, though of course that's an application rather than a web offering.
I did pull together a PDF of what I have eventually printed out for this 3 Peaks route - by selecting the 1:25K pages from the two existing PDF exported options, Portrait and Landscape ... but I couldn't upload it this forum, unfortunately. I'm sure you get what I've been asking about it, though. :)
I understand I may be asking for the moon on a stick but it's good they're listed as feature requests. I'll keep my fingers crossed that other users see the benefit too.
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plotaroute admin Monday 14 Mar 2022 08:53:05
Thanks for that feedback Peter. I think we've come to the same conclusion, that trying to squeeze a 1:25K map onto one page for a large route isn't practical. What you really need is to split the route into sections and I can see that idealy the system would work this out for you! Anyway, it's on the feature request list now. In the meantime, the Split a Route tool is your best option. And you can still keep the original unsplit route when you use this.
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Peter Edwards Monday 14 Mar 2022 10:18:56
Yep, thanks. plotaroute is one of the few tools that has gone to the trouble of sorting out the Ordnance Survey licensing so that map printing is available (for home use) - I presume many other tools which have a global audience simply don't think it's worth the effort for what is only one country's mapping provider. Given plotaroute can boast that feature, it seems such a shame not to be able to take full advantage of it!
I'll keep my fingers crossed other users vote for the features.
In the meantime, thanks so much for a fabulous tool - plotaroute's auto-plotting tool really is second to none!
