CalTopo has supported PDF printing for a little while, but it was tucked away until I made sure that generating the PDFs wouldn’t overload my server.  It’s now front and center in the UI, along with higher resolution PDFs and an important new feature – multi-page map packs.

First off, clicking the print icon in the top right will no longer bounce you straight into browser print mode.  Instead it brings up a menu for choosing between browser printing and the PDF generator:

The new print menu

The PDF option was initially tucked away as a link on the browser print screen, built out to satisfy some grumbling users who wanted exact 1:24k prints.  Since then I’ve found myself using it almost exclusively – the prints are higher resolution and you aren’t limited to a fixed set of zoom levels.  It seemed time for a promotion to first-tier status.

Now for the good part – when you choose “Create a PDF”, you can mark up to 15 pages on the map and dump them into a single PDF file for printing.  Here I’ve marked several pages on a user’s Big SEKI Loop map, all with a 1 inch : 1 mile scale:

When I click “Generate PDF” they come back in a single file, along with an overview page that shows how the maps are positioned relative to each other:

The first page of the PDF shows individual map placement

So try it out!  You can also check out a sample 1:24k PDF of the popular Bunny Flat routes up Shasta, with slope shading.

Please note that this may become a paid feature at some point, depending on how much extra work it creates for my server and the degree to which I need to make a living off CalTopo.

Visitor maps – the nice brochures they give you at park entrances or the giant Forest Service road maps with nary a topo line on them – aren’t terribly useful for backcountry navigation.  However they can be great for visualizing roads and trails at a 10,000′ view and then switching over to other layers as you zoom in.

My first pass at a visitor layer involved manually downloading PDF and TIFF files, erasing areas outside the park boundary, lining up 4-5 points on each map with real world coordinates, and then tiling them.  Where parks and forests met with curvy borders, erasing everything outside their respective borders was painstaking.  Goof one of the alignment points and I had to delete the existing tiles and then re-tile the map.  I got pretty good coverage for California and then gave up.  It was simply too much work and too little benefit.

Since then the park and forest services have done a better job releasing maps as GeoTIFFs and GeoPDFs, and I felt like it was time to take another pass at visitor maps.  In order to avoid the cropping issues that cost me so much time in the first iteration, I went with two layers, one for the NPS and one for the USFS.  There are almost no contiguous national parks, so I could render the park maps as-is without cropping.  Forest Service land is a different story, and after investing too many hours tweaking an edge-detection algorithm I said “good enough”.

The original visitor layer.  Although close, it’s not a perfect fit with the aerial imagery.  This is partly the map’s fault, and partly my inability to perfectly georeference and warp it.

In the new NPS layer,  streams in Tuolumne Meadows line up dead-on with aerial imagery.

New USFS layer.  The automated cropping left a little bit of the left map’s border in place.

As the NPS and USFS continue to release new versions of their maps, I’ll be able to grow these layers to match.  The bad news is that I now have 3 visitor map layers.  I’ll eventually be able to pull the original, but not until all forests in California get updated maps, which likely won’t be for a while.  And there will probably never be a good way to get NPS and USFS maps back together in one layer – but if there’s one feature that defines CalTopo, it’s the ability to mix and match multiple map sources on the fly.