Wikitravel:How to draw a map Travel Guide
From Wikitravel
In this age of satellite imagery, you no longer need to be a professional cartographer to draw an accurate map. The following instructions are for creating standard Wikitravel maps using Sodipodi or its compatible spinoff Inkscape (both free). The process using commercial drawing tools such as Illustrator, Freehand, or CorelDraw is very similar.
An easy 'palette' of tools for creating Wikitravel 'look and feel' maps can be found at Wikitravel-map-template.svg, just import a copy into your own map and copy and paste from there.
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Choose a map type
The instructions below cover two slightly different types of maps:
- Standalone: A single map for destinations that use the Small city or Big city templates, this map covers the whole area and is not divided into smaller chunks.
- Example: Carbondale
- District: A map for Huge city destination, this covers a large area (too big to fit on a single screen) and is divided into multiple districts for display.
- Example: Paris
Convert satellite image to street grid
The first step is to obtain satellite imagery of your chosen location. Navigate to the section you would like to turn into a map, at an eye altitude of approximately 1500 feet, and enter a placemark at the center. Save the image. Use your cursor keys to navigate north, south, west and east, recording new placemarks and images after each imageful of movement.
Next, import the satellite images into your drawing program and align them together. You can make sure the image scales are identical by right-clicking on each image and entering the size under Image properties.
Next, layout the major avenues based on the satellite data. Use the Bezier pen tool, with the stroke color set to "ffffffff", and no fill color. Set the unit of measurement for the stroke width to millimeters and set the width to 1.60mm for major avenues, which can be adjusted up or down later. You may find the Bezier tool a little unwieldly if you don't have graphics program experience, but experiment for a while and you'll soon be able to lay out beautiful curves; the "Edit path nodes" tool (F2) can be used to delete or tweak points in the curve.
District: Work out the rough area of the district, again with this Bezier pen. This time the stroke color is off, and the fill color is "c0c0c0ff". Opening the "item properties" menu, rename the resulting object to "(area)_light_gray_background" where "(area)" is the area being highlighted. Push it behind the avenues, but above the satellite images. Finally, create a dark gray "8e908dff" rectangle as background, covering all the satellite images but not district.
Standalone: Create a light gray "c0c0c0ff" rectangle as background, covering all the satellite images.
Push the background created above to the back of the object stack and bring it up until it covers all satellite pictures and nothing else. Your base map is now complete, from here you can work completely by eye.
Fill out the details
The next step is to layout the rest of the streets of the given area. Again, use the Bezier pen, with no fill color, stroke color of "ffffffff" and usually a width of 1.20mm. Pedestrian streets, including major pathways through parks, should use the stroke color "d0cb75ff" instead. Vary the width as necessary for the size of the street. This work is best done completely by eye; the main technique being to try to match the shapes of the negative spaces between the streets according to several maps. Where the maps disagree, refer back to satellite imagery to verify.
Next, lay out the green spaces, again using the Bezier pen, this time with fill color "89c736ff", stroke color "003857ff", and stroke width of 0.05mm. Zoom in as close as necessary to get this right. If the green area fills up an entire city block between streets, you can set stroke off, draw the area so it overlaps the streets, and then just push the layer down.
After the green spaces, put in the public buildings and major landmarks. For these the fill color is "bdb580ff", the stroke color is "000000ff" and the stroke width is again 0.05mm.
The last graphical elements are any water features, fountains etc. For these, use the fill color "9ccec9ff", stroke color "7fb5b5ff" and a variable stroke width depending on the situation.
The final step is adding the street names, starting with major boulevards. The recommended font is the free version of Blue Highway by Ray Larabie. The font is included in Knoppix, and Mandrake Linux. You can also find it in this tarball of fonts on the Debian FTP server.
The street names are not black, but gray: the fill color setting is "585858ff". This sets the attraction names and plaza names off better. Try to use the biggest point size for each street name label which you can get away with, the biggest being about 6pts. The exact measurements will change based on the scale of your map of course.
Annotate the map
Your street map is now ready, now it's time to turn it into a travel guide.
Create a box to hold all the attractions covered by your map: this should be just a white rectangle ("ffffffff") with black edges ("000000ff", 0.05 mm edges) filled with the standard icons from Wikitravel:Common map symbols.
Take all the entries of the Wikitravel article and start placing them in the map. Ideally, of course, you'll know exactly where everything goes already but an online address locator like Google Maps is very handy for refreshing your memory. As you place each entry in the map, also record the names and numbers into the entry listing box. If you use the standard icons from the template (and you should), you can change the numbers just by selecting the text tool, clicking on top of the icon and then editing the number; note that it's usually faster to lay out all the icons first and then number them as the final step.
To create an itinerary map, create a new layer and place it just above the Streets layer. Draw a Bezier curve showing the route, then set it to pure red ("ff0000ff"), thickness 0.4 mm, style dashed, beginning stroke marker "Dot_m", mid-marker "Arrow2Send", end marker "SquareM".
Export the finished map
As SVG cannot be handled as is by most browsers, you should export a copy to PNG. Select the light gray background, and then in the export window choose Selection and enter an appropriate width in pixels — 1000 pixels is usually reasonable, as it will give a good result when printed and is still viewable on a monitor. You'll put a smaller thumbnail of the map in the article itself.
To optimize the resulting raw dump, load it up in an image editor like Gimp and choose Image→Mode→Indexed Color dialog. Set the number of colors to 64, turn off dithering and save the image. Usually the image size is about 1/6th of what it was before reducing the color set, and the quality is barely changed.
Tips and tricks
- Use the edit path nodes tool (F2) for manipulating streets, since this keeps the stroke width constant.
- To extend a street, select it with edit path nodes tool and then choose the Bezier tool. Any nodes you add will become a part of the same object.
- Use ALT-cursor keys to 'nudge' objects into the right place.
- Objects can be combined into layers, which can be made visible or invisible by clicking on the "eye" icon. The following layer stack makes it easy to 'peel part' various components of a map: background - satellite data - area highlight - street map - area annotations.
