I f**king hate computers.

Can anyone help me get topographic info off the damn internet onto a large piece of paper so I can work on a design by hand where I know what I'm doing? Getting some kinda effing frustrated here...

John Brownlee wrote:Can anyone help me get topographic info off the damn internet onto a large piece of paper so I can work on a design by hand where I know what I'm doing? Getting some kinda effing frustrated here...

I can't help you with that but it was funny you posted this just as I was thinking the very same thing as your title...my 'challenge' is posting pictures from a different and really better computer than I've ever had, but it has so many 'extras' I can't do the simple picture posting that I have done in the past...I sympathize greatly

Yeah computers just aren't intuitive for me. Plants and soil make more sense.

Can you just take screenshots and print them out and tape them together? If I get really angry with image stuff I go for the screenshot and it usually saves the day. If you want to go up a level on the annoyance meter, you could paste the images together in a image program like ms publisher, photoshop, gimp, or inkscape, and then print.
William

William, I'll try that.

You can pay lots of places to print out topos for you, whatever scale you want. Or you can buy the USGS map for the area you want.

As for printing it yourself? I am just as frustrated....

I can help you John. I'm a draftsman by trade and considering a business doing things exactly like this. It would give me a chance to try my concept out.




Edited to add a sample plot plan on 24"x36" paper.

A couple times a year I make a map of my property, and this is the general procedure I use:

1. Zoom in on your GIS map to the highest resolution and take a screen shot.

2. Crop the image to the map portion, and save it with a descriptive name (South-West.bmp, for example). I prefer the .bmp file format for saving these images since I don't want substantial image quality losses due to compression.

3. Move the map and repeat steps 1 and 2 until the whole area is imaged.

4. Combine all the images into one large picture file and save it. I use Gimp, for picture editing. The picture file should be rather large (typically 60 - 100 megabytes for my maps).

5. Open the picture file in Microsoft Excel and set Excel so you can see where the page breaks are.

6. Stretch the picture to however large you want it. I typically make my maps 3 sheets tall and around 5 sheets tall.

7. Print.

8. Cut off paper margins and tape together into map.

John, I tried something similar to your method on my own and it was a total disaster. I'll try it again step by step.

Rick, I'll still take help, and your example looks great.