UKH

Hi All, 

I'm hoping to go down the route of printing off the 'desired area' for when out and about. Having a printed, smaller and laminated version from OS online to keep handy in the jacket pocket, rather than the full OS map, which I tend to only need 2-4 folded sections. 

What do people do for this? I was hoping to get the map down to a manageable size, but OS only prints as small as A4 which is understandable. 

*FYI: I would always carry the full map in the rucksack as a back up.* 

Really, I print out and laminate on a4 so I don't have to carry the map with me!

Surely you can just print onto A4 and then chop it down to whatever size you want?

Or if the scale doesn't matter, your printer settings might let you scale it down to A5 or whatever you fancy.

If your printer doesn't have that option, you could "print to PDF" instead and then resize the PDF. Most operating systems have a built in option to print to PDF these days but if not, free software like CutePDF will add it for you. Then Adobe Reader will print the created PDF in whatever size you want. You're likely to have that installed anyway but if not it's a free download from Adobe.

Have you tried putting A5 in your printer and setting it up. It seems strange that the software and not the computer/printer combination is setting the paper size.

I use Grough route to print maps at A4 side. As I don't have a laminator I fold them into an Ortleib clear case sold for keeping cards in. It is small enough to be manageable and careful folding means you don't have to refold on the hill.

Unfortunately the software's a bit crap like that. Only goes down to A4. The margins are so huge anyway that an A5 print would consist mainly of white space.

My mistake - I just checked, seems it can do A5.

Save map as an image file and put a white border round the image so that when you print it, the white border can be cut off.

I take a snip of the area I want then copy and paste this onto a word doc with no borders. Then you can use the paper size you want, or put 2 x images onto a4 and cut them out

On ultra runs for tricky nav sections I have used a combination of os snips, Google earth images and recce photos on each a4 page