Map Poster of Any Place

What is on the map, and where it comes from

The streets, rivers, lakes, parks and woods are OpenStreetMap data, the map of the world that volunteers keep up to date street by street. This page reads it as vector tiles from OpenFreeMap, a free tile service that rebuilds the whole planet from OpenStreetMap about once a week in the OpenMapTiles layout, and draws them in your browser with the open-source MapLibre GL JS library (version 6.14.0, BSD licence, served from this site). That is why a footpath laid out last month can already be on your poster, and also why one that is missing from OpenStreetMap is missing here.

Roads are drawn by their class, heaviest first: motorways, trunk roads, primary, secondary and tertiary roads, then residential streets, service roads and finally footpaths and tracks as hairlines. At the default zoom a motorway prints about 0.5 mm wide on A4 and a residential street about 0.2 mm, so the big routes give the poster its shape and the side streets its texture. Railways are a fine dashed line; tunnels are left out, because they are not visible from above. There are deliberately no labels, icons or buildings: at poster scale names would be type too small to read, and your title names the place instead.

Finding the exact spot

The Place box first searches the same list of 171,041 towns of 1,000 or more people that the Polyatic star map uses, loaded from this site as you type, so Skagen or Aarhus appear instantly and no other server is asked. A street, a park, a beach or an address is not on that list: press Enter or Search and the page asks OpenStreetMap's Nominatim geocoder once. It follows Nominatim's usage policy to the letter: it never asks while you type, it sends at most one request a second, and it remembers each answer for the rest of your visit, so pressing Enter twice costs one request. Up to five matches come back; the first is shown at once and the others are listed underneath in case you meant a different Tivoli.

Framing, zoom and scale

Drag the map to move it and use − and + to zoom; each step shows about 1.4 times more or less ground. The default view of a city is about 9 km across: Paris at the default zoom is 8.9 km wide and 10.6 km tall on the poster, a scale of roughly 1 : 49,000 on A4. Zoom in two steps for a neighbourhood around a single park or square. The address bar keeps the place, zoom, style, title and subtitle (?lat=55.6734&lon=12.5692&z=14&style=dark&title=Tivoli), so a link opens the same poster on another device.

Five styles, and how each prints in black and white

The style buttons change colour only. Every style draws the same layers with the same line widths, so a motorway is exactly as heavy in Blueprint as in Light, and switching style never moves or re-crops your map. Light is near-black roads on off-white paper with pale blue water, the classic gift-poster look. Dark is cream roads on almost-black paper. Blueprint is pale blue-white lines on deep drafting blue (#1b3a6b), with water a darker blue than the land. Sepia is brown ink on warm cream, like an old atlas page. Ink is pure black roads on white, and the only colour on the sheet is the blue of the water and the green of parks and woods.

Many people print at home or at a copy shop in black and white, and a greyscale printer keeps only how light or dark each colour is (its luminance), not its hue. So each style was chosen by the numbers: the WCAG contrast ratio between ordinary roads and the land is at least 8.5 : 1 in every style (Ink 17.4, Dark 12.6, Light 10.0, Sepia 8.6, Blueprint 8.5), and major roads reach at least 10.5 : 1, far above the 3 : 1 usually asked of graphics; the title and coordinates are at least 4.5 : 1. Water stays a visibly different grey from land in every style (1.3 to 2.0 : 1), which is enough to see a coastline or a lake but subtle by design. The honest limit is parks and woods: in Light and Dark they are only about 1.14 : 1 from the land, so in greyscale they nearly disappear; if green space matters on your print, pick Ink, where parks are a clear mid-grey (1.64 : 1) and water darker still (2.0 : 1).

Printing it

Download makes one file at 300 dots per inch, the usual standard for photo and poster prints: A4 is 2480 × 3508 pixels, A3 3508 × 4961 and A2 4961 × 7016 (35 million pixels). The map is not a screenshot of the preview; it is drawn again off screen at 2.16 times the detail for A4, 3.06 for A3 and 4.32 for A2, so lines stay sharp on paper. Because the A series all share the 1 : √2 shape, every size shows exactly the same area with the same proportions, and roads and text grow with the paper: a residential street that prints 0.2 mm wide on A4 is 0.4 mm on A2. PNG is best for a photo lab or for sharing; PDF is a single page of exactly the chosen paper size (an A2 page is 1190.55 × 1683.78 points) with the image filling it and the OpenStreetMap credit as real text, which is what most print shops and copy centres ask for. In the print dialog choose Actual size or 100%. A home printer leaves a thin white edge, which suits the Light, Sepia and Ink styles; for Dark and Blueprint, whose paper is a solid colour edge to edge, a photo lab or print shop gives a cleaner result and uses far less of your own ink.

Frame sizes: 30 × 40 cm, 50 × 70 cm, 11 × 14, 16 × 20 and 18 × 24 in

Change size also offers the sizes that ready-made frames are sold in: 30 × 40 cm (3543 × 4724 pixels) and 50 × 70 cm (5906 × 8268) in Europe, and 11 × 14, 16 × 20 and 18 × 24 inches (3300 × 4200, 4800 × 6000 and 5400 × 7200) in the US. The PDF page is exactly the frame size: 50 × 70 cm is 1417.32 × 1984.25 points, 18 × 24 in is 1296 × 1728. These sheets are not the 1 : √2 shape of A4, so the poster is not simply stretched: the margins, the title, the subtitle, the coordinates and the credit keep their A4 proportions to the sheet's width, and the map frame takes whatever height is left. The 3 : 4 sheets (30 × 40 cm, 18 × 24 in) therefore show about 8% less ground top to bottom than A4, 16 × 20 in about 16% less and 11 × 14 in about 14% less, while 50 × 70 cm is almost A-shaped and loses about 1%. The preview switches to the chosen shape, so what you frame on screen is what prints. Larger sheets mean more WebGL work: the 50 × 70 cm map is 5144 × 6077 pixels, still inside the 8192 limit of most computers; an iPhone saves it at about 175 dpi and says so.

Honest limits: the coordinates line is the centre of the map, rounded to four decimals (about 11 m). The page needs a working connection for the tiles, so it cannot make a poster offline, and a very remote area may show little more than water and a few tracks because that is all OpenStreetMap has there. An A2 map is 4321 × 5177 pixels of WebGL drawing, inside the 8192-pixel limit of most computers but over the 4096 of some phones and tablets, and iPhones refuse any canvas over 16.7 million pixels; on such a device the page saves the largest size that works and says the dpi it used (an A2 from an iPhone comes out at about 200 dpi, still sharp from a step away). For the full 300 dpi at A2, save it on a computer.

Drawing a run, ride or trip from a GPX file

Add a route (GPX) draws a track on the map in the style’s accent colour (crimson on Light, red on Dark and Ink, orange on Blueprint, brick on Sepia) over a thin light halo, so it stays readable where it runs along a road of a similar tone, and moves the map so the whole route fits with a margin. Getting the file: on Strava, open one of your activities, then the ⋯ menu → Export GPX; in Garmin Connect, the activity’s gear menu → Export to GPX; on Komoot, the tour’s ⋯ menu → Download → GPX. The page reads the track points (trk; each trkseg is drawn as its own line, so a pause in a watch’s recording leaves a gap instead of a straight jump) and, when a file has none, the planned route points (rte). Waypoints are left out. A FIT or TCX file is not GPX and is refused with a message; the poster stays as it was.

The distance is the sum of great-circle (haversine) distances between consecutive points on a sphere of 6,371 km radius, without elevation. It can differ by a percent or two from the figure in your app, which smooths jittery GPS points or snaps them to the map; a 1-second recording of a 10 km run has about 3,000 points and lands closer than a 30-second one. Tick Distance as subtitle to print it under the title, in km or miles. The start is a light dot ringed in the accent colour and the finish a dark dot; on a loop the start sits inside the finish. Limits: the route is not part of the link that Copy link makes (load the file again on another device), a long tour pulls the zoom out until side streets are faint, and a route that crosses the 180° meridian is not supported.

Questions people ask

How do I make a map poster of the place where we met?

Type the town into the Place box and pick it from the list, or type the exact spot (a park, a café, a street or an address, like “Tivoli, Copenhagen”) and press Enter to look it up in OpenStreetMap. Drag the map and use the + and − buttons to frame it, type your own title and subtitle (a name, a date, “where we met”), choose one of the five styles, pick the size (A4, A3, A2, 30 × 40 cm, 50 × 70 cm, or 11 × 14, 16 × 20 or 18 × 24 in) and PNG or PDF under the Download button, and press Download for a 300 dpi file.

Can I put my Strava, Garmin or Komoot route on the map poster?

Yes. Export the activity as a GPX file (Strava: the activity’s ⋯ menu → Export GPX; Garmin Connect: gear menu → Export to GPX; Komoot: ⋯ → Download → GPX), then choose it under “Add a route (GPX)” or drop it on the poster. The line is drawn in the style’s accent colour, the map fits the route, and it prints on every PNG and PDF size, optionally with start and finish dots and the distance in km or miles as the subtitle. The file is read in your browser and never uploaded, and no Strava or Garmin account is connected.

Will the map poster print well in black and white?

Yes. In all five styles the roads have at least 8.5 : 1 contrast against the land in luminance, which is what a greyscale printer keeps, so the street pattern prints crisply on a black-and-white laser printer. Water stays a slightly different grey. Parks and woods fade to almost the land colour in Light and Dark; the Ink style keeps them a clear grey.

Is the map poster free?

Yes. There is no price, no account and no watermark. The map data is OpenStreetMap’s, published under the Open Database License, so the poster carries the line “© OpenStreetMap contributors” and an OpenFreeMap credit; you may print it, frame it and give it away.

What size is the printable map poster?

Eight sizes, each at 300 dots per inch. The A series: A4 (21 × 29.7 cm) is 2480 × 3508 pixels, A3 (29.7 × 42 cm) is 3508 × 4961 and A2 (42 × 59.4 cm) is 4961 × 7016. The common ready-made frame sizes: 30 × 40 cm is 3543 × 4724, 50 × 70 cm is 5906 × 8268, and 11 × 14 in, 16 × 20 in and 18 × 24 in are 3300 × 4200, 4800 × 6000 and 5400 × 7200. Choose them with Change size under the Download button. The PDF is one page of exactly that paper size with the same 300 dpi image on it, so a print shop can print it at 100% without scaling. A4 is the default.

What is sent over the internet when I use it?

Two things, both to OpenStreetMap-based services: the map tiles for the area on the poster come from tiles.openfreemap.org, and a place you search with Enter or the Search button goes to nominatim.openstreetmap.org (only when the built-in town list does not know it). Your title, subtitle and the poster file are made in your browser and are never uploaded.

Why are there no street names on the map?

On purpose: a poster at this scale would carry thousands of names in type too small to read, and the place is named in the title instead. Leaving labels off also means no font has to be fetched from another server.