Anyone have any recommendations for apps for accessing and printing topo maps?

I just loaded the 'Offline Topo Maps' app by TrailBehind and it looks pretty good with one big drawback. It has the highest resolution maps, is fairly fast, and has a nice feature of both allowing you to select large areas to cache for offline viewing when out of wifi for cell range and also storing recently viewed areas.

But what would be great is if an app allowed you to select an area and then created a jpg or other image out of it. Then you could email this or copy it to a laptop and print the map to take with you. None of the apps I have viewed seem to have any print functionality. Anyone have one? If not an app, then maybe a website that would be close enough?

TrailBehind licenses my map layers, so for the major ones (topo, USFS and aerial) you can print maps that match the layers in OTM by going to http://caltopo.com/ and clicking the print icon in the top right. Google Chrome works best as Firefox and IE don't respect borderless HTML printing.

I'm also working on a feature that allows you to draw a rectangle on the screen and create a PDF of that exact area, which bypasses a lot of the browser printing quirks and lets you do thinks like exact 1:24k scale maps, for people who are into that sort of thing. It's all done, I just need to upgrade my server first because PDF generation eats up a lot of memory. This will eventually be a paid feature but the in-browser printing will remain free.

Doesn't seem you'd be able to print that, or set up a jpg to print later on another system, if you are using a smartphone or tablet right?

The server-side PDF generation should work with phones and tablets, but yes, most of them don't support browser printing.

Maybe I'm missing something, but why do you want to generate an image on a phone, transfer it to a computer and then print it, when you can just print directly from the computer? I don't know of any smartphone apps that do map printing, but that doesn't mean they don't exist . . .

The idea would be to be able to use my laptop as little as possible... so could set up some maps on a phone or tablet when piddling around doing something else and not on the computer, and then just copy them over for printing later.

You may also be interested in my site called Alpine Topo. I plan on adding more features to it, but for now it does it's main job which is to generate a map. It's best to zoom in all the way in terrain mode before hitting the generate map button.

Also don't forget to copy the source to maximize your resolution!



Currently it only supports U.S. Topo (via MyTopo) but some day I hope to have more countries in the topo mode.

Still not an app, but the PDF generation feature is now live and works with tablets. Smartphone screens pose some UI issues due to their size and I'm not sure if/when it will ever work well with those. Overall, there are still a few rough edges that need polishing.

There's a blog post with more information or you can go to directly to the print page.

Best App I have found for an iPhone is TopoMaps. It cost $8 and allows you to download EVERY quad map in the US. It also uses the GPS in the phone to show your current position. This feature still works if you do not have cell service because it runs off of the GPS device in your phone. You can add way points and enter Lat/Longs. This application works so well that we have taken our Garmin 276 out of our helicopter and bought an iPAd. It is very user friendly and helps out immensely when in flight and with mission planning. Only down fall is you need to have cellular service to down load the Quads beforehand.