Building your own lake or river maps is great fun. But now I would like to use them as wall art. (large posters A1)) However good map composition is not that simple. Making decisions on map legends, Scale indication, north arrow, font and size for text, collars, margins, grid lines etc... all are very important to get good looking (large) maps.

The easiest way would be good templates for Global Mapper, QGis or something else.

Who is having some experience in this matter and would like so share his knowledge with us? Or where to find a good tutorial?

I was thinking of it as a great Christmas present for one of my best fishing buddies ...

Hello Danny,


You have ArcGIS. This program can create A0, A1 or smaller charts (e. g. as pdf for poster from a print shop) with all features, as You want.

You can use the RM shapes for this purpose.
Such posters hanging in my apartment.
Here is a sample.
www.lav-mv.de/gewaesservz/uploads/2c_tka1.pdf
Try it with up to 1.600 % zoom ...


Best wishes
fjordfisher

Very nice example Fjordfisher.

How did you make decisions on font size in relation to printing size?

I send You an email. Please look also into the ArcGIS help:
resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.1/i.../006600000009000000/

I'm very interested too in this process.
Would you mind sharing the infos, please?
Regards

Do you have ArcGIS?
If yes, whats your concrete question?
The workflow is:
- set printer settings to A1, A0 or so
- design the chart in ArcGIS
- export map as pdf and select as much as possible dpi
- optional - go to the copy shop and have a poster made for you

I was able to use QGis and create hi res images. I then went to www.stickersbanners.com/banners.html and order vinyl posters for a reasonable price (4'x6' < $50 US) the quality was excellent.

For those that want to get even more crazy we were able to work with g2gemini.com and create custom jerseys with our lake map as a background.

Missed one image

I'm on Qgis.

So you just imported the PDF in ArcGIS, am I wrong it? This way you can just go with any illustration program like Adobe illustrator but without caring about printing scale.

I thought you made shapefile output from RM and then edited the project in the GIS application.

Anyway thx for your suggestion.