MapOSMatic User Guide

Here you can select a rectangular map area. The map shown is a typical “slippy” online map, on the left you have buttons for zooming in and out, a button to detect your current location, and a search button to search for a place by name.

By default the full visible map area is selected here, but you may also use the [Select area] button to enable a more sophisticated area selection tool.

When pressing the [Select area] button the user interface changes a bit, you’ll now see a highlighted rectangular area that marks the actual selected area. You can drag the four corners of the rectangle around to change its shape and size, and you can move the complete area by dragging it along by the dotted marker in its upper left corner.

With [Select area within current zoom] you can make the full visible area the new selection, and the [Remove selection] brings you back to the original mode.

The four number fields below the map show the current min. and max. latitude and longitude of your selected area.

When you are satisfied with your selection you can use the [>] button on the right to move on to the next form step.

On the “City search” tab you can enter a city or place name in the input field, if the administrative borders of that city or place are known to OpenStreetMap these can be used to determine the map area to use automatically.

A dropdown below the field will show possible matches for your input as you type. Only the matches that are printed in black are selectable. The matches printed in grey are either place nodes for which no border information is available in OSM yet, or the place area is too large to be printed with this web service.

Here you can upload data files containing geographic featuers in the form of GPX tracks, Umap exports, or general GeoJSON files, which will then be rendered on top of the base map.

The upload form performs some basic checks, so it will complain when one of the uploaded files is not in a supported format, or does not contain any actual data.

Note that the files will be stored on the web server, and that the map generated from them (but not the actual uploaded files themselves) will be visible to everyone. So do not upload any sensitive data you don’t want to to be seen in public, or that you don’t have the permission to share in public.

Once files have been selected and verified, the form switches back to the area selection tabl, where it will show a preview of the imported file contents, and the optimal map area to display all contained data.

If you want to render a different area, e.g. just a smaller part of the data, or a larger area showing more context beyond the data itself, you can change the selection area accordingly.

This is the default OpenStreetMap style, as used on the OpenStreetMap Website.

The installed style sheet is usually up to date with the latest released version of the style, in the future it may also be possible to select older versions of the style.

TODO: image

This style was originally developed along with the MapOSMatic web frontend and renderer, to provide a style more suitable for printed output than the original OpenStreetMap Carto style. Unfortunately it is basically unmaintained and has not seen any updates in several years now.

This is a variant of the CartoOSM style in which all color values have been replaced with equivalent grayscale values. This style variant is suitable for printing on single color printers, and as a underlying base style when using one of the map overlay styles, so that the overlay featuers clearly stand out.

The Toner style, originally created by Stamen Design, uses clear black and white only, and so produces a very high contrast result.

The German style is a fork of the CartoOSM style, with some features styled a bit differently to closer match typical German map design. For example the color scheme for major roads is different to the original OSM style.

The German style also supports localization, so with this style the locale choice in the final form step not only affects the language the copyright notices and annotations at the bottom of the map are printed in, but also the language used for labels on actual map features.

The Empty style does not render anything at all. It was originally added as an aid for overlay development, to be able to render maps contianing overlay features only.

In combination with the Schwarzplan overlay it now serves a valid non-debug purpose, too, allowing to print pure Schwarzplan output.

The scale bar overlay gets placed in the lower left corner of the map. It shows the real world size of the map grid squares, and the actual map scale factor.

The compas rose gets placed in the upper left corner of the map and shows the direction of true geographic north. For now it just points straight up as unfortunately the Mapnik renderer does not support on-the-fly rotation of map data.

The QR code gets placed in the lower right corner of the map. For now it only contains the URL of the map request itself, allowing to re-create the same map with up-to-date data.

In the future there will be a form field for custom text input.

The contour lines overlay comes in two variants, one showing one contour line every 10 meters of elevation (below left) and one showing a line every 100 meters only (below right).

The WayMarkedTraisl overlays offer the same route overlays as the Waymarked Trails website.