PDF Improvements
CalTopo PDFs are now sporting a couple of improvements.
The most noticeable of those is a title input field on the print page:
If filled out, it will show up in a couple places. On the bottom of the PDF itself:
Slightly less noticeable is an improvement in label positioning. Before, labels were drawn without regard to each other; on a busy map, this resulted in an unreadable mess. Now, labels will not draw on top of each other. If two labels conflict, the PDF generator will attempt to move them around (to only few positions; it’s not very smart yet), and if that doesn’t solve the problem, it will omit the second label to improve readability.
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Label 2 automatically floated to the left to avoid conflicts. |
Finally, although hard to demonstrate on a screen, MapBuilder layers will now print better. To create high resolution PDFs, CalTopo starts with a large image and then shrinks it down to fit the page. With layers that look the same at all zoom levels, like USGS map scans, this works great. With layers that get redrawn at each zoom level, like OpenStreetMap, shrinks all the lines and text down to the point where they’re hard to read.
When you print a MapBuilder layer, the PDF generator will request a tile that’s been scaled up by a custom amount so that lines weights and text will come out looking right. This is only possible on layers produced in-house, but at some point I may ramp up an OpenStreetMap server so that I can do the same thing with OSM maps.
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1:24k PDF created without scaling |
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1:24k PDF with scaling |