If it's only going to be a small inset on a page, you can make it much smaller. If it's to be a wall poster, you'll likely need a rather large image. Print resolution standard is usually around 300 DPI. If you want to print it out, think about what size it will be printed at. Try to think of how you want to use your image, and choose your image size accordingly. This rule applies to maps as well as other kinds of images. The reason for this is that it's easy to maintain sharpness when reducing, but enlarging invariably makes raster images look grainy and pixelated. If you are working with raster images, a good general rule is that reducing the size of your image is not a problem, but enlarging it is almost never a good option. If you are ever going to print your image, you must also consider DPI (dots per inch). Bearing in mind the purpose of each scale, it's interesting to compare the difference in detail shown on each map.įor any kind of graphic, the size of your image or art board in pixels is an important consideration.
#Cartography icons mapublisher full size#
The local map has been shrunk down to less than a quarter its full size the continental map is just a little smaller than full size and the world map has been almost quadrupled from its native (rather tiny) size. Local maps are where you can go all-out on fine detail, but even then, if you feel like you're crowding things in, perhaps it's time to move down to another, larger scale still.įinally, here are the three images in the scale comparison all scaled to the same size.
Continental maps need only show continental detail. This is the crux, which I forgot to state clearly in my article on scale: world maps need only show world level detail. Will it actually show more detail when reduced down so drastically? There's a real possibility that it will in fact do the opposite, obscuring the important details with a mess of barely visible tiny details. Although it could be used to make the other two maps more detailed, you have to ask yourself if that's necessary – or even desirable.
What this means is that even though the local scale map is much more detailed, it doesn't mean that it's better than the other maps. What's perhaps not so clear, but crucially important for cartography, is that the smaller scales are not meant to show things in great detail. Moreover, erosion produces more realistic results at higher resolutions/larger scales. Clearly, higher resolutions show more detail. The point to take away from this is perhaps rather obvious, but its implications are not. They are still in scale with each other, regardless of what size they are viewed at. Note that the full resolution local map is far too big to display at full size here, so I have scaled all the maps down to fit. It's important to understand that these scales all show the same area.
So a single 100 x 100 pixel area of the world map would become a 400 x 400 pixel continental map, or a 1,600 x 1,600 pixel local map. The step down between each scale is a quadrupling of the previous one. To recap, I have been developing the +World of Calidar on three different scales: My article on scale was perhaps lacking in clear examples, so I have prepared some more images to show visually what I described in that article.
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