Pen plotter map art: streets, water and contour lines
Plot the streets, rivers and contour lines of any place from OpenStreetMap and open elevation data: scale, layers, pens, contour interval and credit.
Updated
A map is already made of lines, which is why a pen plotter draws one so well. Plotcaster’s Map style fetches the streets, water, railways and contour lines for any place on Earth, lays them out on your paper and exports an SVG with each kind of feature on its own layer. It all happens in your browser: the data comes straight from OpenStreetMap and open elevation tiles, and nothing passes through us.
Find the place
Type a town, a neighbourhood, a mountain or an island into the place search. Results appear as you type. Pick one and the map centres on it; then move and zoom until the framing is right. The map area always has the shape of your paper, so what you see is what gets drawn.
Choose the scale
The scale decides almost everything else: how many streets there are, how long the plot takes and whether contour lines are worth drawing. Start from a scale preset, then zoom in or out. As a rough guide for an A4 or Letter sheet:
| Ground across the map | What reads well | Start from |
|---|---|---|
| About 1 km | A few blocks: every street, footpaths, even buildings | The Streets and buildings preset at the Neighbourhood scale |
| 2 to 5 km | A city centre or a small town | The Streets preset |
| 10 to 25 km | A whole city, a coastline, a range of hills | Streets and contours |
| 50 km and more | Mountains, volcanoes, islands | The Topographic preset |
Bigger paper holds more ground at the same density, so on A3 you can go one step further out.
Pick the layers
Each preset switches a set of layers on; change any of them afterwards.
- Streets: major roads, streets, railways and water. The classic city poster.
- Topographic: water and contour lines, no roads.
- Streets and contours: for hilly towns and trail maps.
- Streets and buildings: streets, footpaths and tracks, railways, water and building outlines, for a few blocks. Use it at the Neighbourhood scale.
Footpaths and buildings are only fetched when you switch them on, because dense cities have a lot of both. Over a large area they add hours to a plot and very little to the picture, so keep them for small maps.
With roads on, Road weight decides how importance shows with a single pen. Bolder major roads draws motorways and main roads with two or three parallel strokes so they read heavier without a pen change. One stroke for every road keeps every street a single line, which is faster and suits a delicate print.
One layer per pen
Every kind of feature lands on its own layer in the SVG, named the way AxiDraw’s layer control reads it (1 Streets, 2 Water and so on), so each one can go in its own pen. The defaults are black for streets and railways, blue for water and orange for contour lines; change them with Roads and rail ink, Water ink and Contours ink to match the pens you own.
Plot light colours first and dark ones last, so small registration errors hide under the dark lines, and tape the paper down so it cannot move between pens.
Contour lines
Switch on Contour lines and the tool fetches elevation for the area from AWS Terrain Tiles and traces lines of equal height.
- Contour interval is the height between neighbouring lines. Automatic picks one from the terrain and the paper size. Choose a fixed value, from 1 m to 500 m, when you want round numbers or want to match a printed map.
- Bold every puts every 4th, 5th or 10th contour on a separate layer so you can draw it with a thicker pen, like the index contours on a survey map.
- Contour smoothness smooths the terrain a little before tracing, which removes tiny noisy loops. Raise it if the lines look nervous.
Know the data’s limits. Most of the world is covered at about 30 m resolution (finer in some countries, such as the United States), so contours shine in hills and mountains and show little in a flat city. Sharp summits come out slightly low: in this data the Matterhorn is about 125 m short of its real height.
Frame, title and credit
Frame cuts the map to a rectangle or a circle with an outline around it, or leaves it unframed. Title and coordinates writes the place name and its coordinates under the map in a single-stroke font the pen can draw, so the lettering plots as cleanly as the streets. Type your own Title to replace the place name.
Credit line plots a small ”© OpenStreetMap contributors” under the map. Leave it on for anything you share, sell or give away. The data is licensed under the Open Database License, which asks for that credit whenever a print made from it is shown in public. If you switch the line off for a cleaner plot, put the credit beside the print, in its caption or listing, or on the packaging of a product. The terms say more.
Export
The export dialog shows the paper size, the layers and the estimated plot time before anything downloads. Download one SVG with every layer, or a zip with one SVG per layer, which is easier to load pen by pen in drivers that do not read layers. Either way the units are millimetres and the files contain strokes only, so nothing needs rescaling.
Dense city maps are long plots, often longer than a portrait. If the estimate is more than you want to sit through, switch off footpaths and buildings, zoom out a step, or set road weight to one stroke.
FAQ
Where does the map data come from? Streets, water and railways come from OpenStreetMap through the Overpass API, and elevation from AWS Terrain Tiles. Your browser fetches them directly; the privacy policy lists what each service receives.
Can I sell prints of a map I made? Yes. The artwork is yours and the OpenStreetMap licence allows selling it, as long as the credit ”© OpenStreetMap contributors” goes with it, on the print or next to it.
Why is the map slow to load, or empty? The map data services are free and shared, so a busy server can take a while or turn down a very large request. Try a smaller area or fewer layers, or try again in a minute.
Can I plot a map I already have as a picture? Yes, with the Trace colour style. See Extract roads or contour lines from a map image.
What are ridgelines? The Ridgelines style draws a place’s terrain as stacked horizontal profiles with hidden lines removed, the record-sleeve look. It uses only elevation data, so it works best on mountains, volcanoes and islands.