ProFantasy Community Forum

Printing your map

Crimson_KingCrimson_King
in Mapping with ProFantasy's Software
I have posted a few things here today most of which I ended up answering myself lol. The one thing I need to know is my map looks sorta tiny on the screen if I go somewhere to get it printed up on a 24x36 poster is it just going to be a bigger version of the tiny picture? Will everything look good blown up or will it be blurry? Should I post my finished product here for reference and see what people say I should do?
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Comments

  • MonsenMonsen Administrator 🖼️ 81 images Cartographer
    Unless the printing service supports campaign cartographer files (Most don't), you will need to export it to an image file first. By zooming into this image file to match roughly the size it would be on paper, you should be able to see approximately what quality you will end up with. CC3's symbols and fills are all of very high quality, so you should be able to get a reasonably good quality result.

    When exporting to an image file, remember to change the setting, as the default setting after install is a rather low-res file not suitable for printing services.
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  • Crimson_KingCrimson_King
    ah ok how do I go about changing the export settings? And thank you for all of your help!
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  • MonsenMonsen Administrator 🖼️ 81 images Cartographer
    The options button in the 'Save As' dialog (AFTER you have selected the appropriate file type)
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  • Crimson_KingCrimson_King
    Ok I see I can change it from 8 bit to 24 bit and change the quality all the way up to 100 ( its at 75 to begin with) is that what I should do?
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  • MonsenMonsen Administrator 🖼️ 81 images Cartographer
    If you create a png file (which is generally the bast image type for these maps), none of those really matters. Quality is for jpeg-images, and bit depth for bitmap images. What you want to change is the resolution (maximum image dimensions). Try something like 6000 x 6000, that should give a quite high-quality image.
    Make sure the Crop and restrict options are checked.
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  • 1 year later
  • SorpawSorpaw Newcomer
    edited December 2016
    How do you "zoom" a graphic file to see what the plan looks like at various sizes (8.5" C 11", 11" X 17", 17" X 22" and so on)? I do not know what size look best when dealing with a medium/large plan. I have 12+ house levels that I would like to print so that the icons and text are legible, but I have never tried to use an "Out-Of-House" printer before.
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  • MonsenMonsen Administrator 🖼️ 81 images Cartographer
    Well, that is rather difficult because screen size is not linked to paper size, you need to take into account the dpi of your monitor to calculate that correctly, otherwise it would just be a zoom into the same size are as on the paper, and that would not help you determine if text/graphics would be legible on paper.

    I would recommend you print it on your own printer first, in the same format as you plan to do out-of-house. If your printer doesn't support that page size, print part of the image instead, so that size would be the same. For example, in CC3(+), if you do a scaled print, it would be the exact same size on a A4 page as an A3 one (but the A3 page would only contain half the drawing obviously). Either print a single page if it is enough to check the legibility, or just use the tiled printing feature of CC3 to print all the pages as tiles, and when happy, you can do a single large print at the out-of-house printer.
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