About PlotMyMap
A small, independent project, made in Spain, that turns open map data into maps drawn in lines.
How it started
PlotMyMap began in a home workshop, with a 3D printer turned into a pen plotter: a machine that, instead of melting plastic, holds a pen and draws on paper. The first thing it was asked to draw was maps: the home valley, the village by the sea, the mountain of weekend hikes.
The trouble is that a pen cannot fill. Ordinary maps are made of colour patches, gradients and filled lettering, and none of that can be drawn with a half-millimetre tip. So a dedicated engine had to be written to build the map out of strokes only: streets with just the right weight, areas filled with hatching, sea made of shore lines and single-stroke lettering.
Over time it became clear that the style, the line drawing, was also liked on screen and in print, with no plotter involved. PlotMyMap is that tool, open to anyone.
What makes it different
Drawn, not cropped. Every map is built line by line for the paper and scale you choose. It is not an enlarged screenshot of another map: that is why lines stay sharp at any size.
No retouching by hand. Everything in the gallery comes from the same tool you can use. What you see is what you would download.
The scale is real. If you ask for 1:25,000, one centimetre on paper is 250 metres on the ground, and you can check it with a ruler.
Where the data comes from
Streets, paths, rivers and names come from OpenStreetMap, the free map maintained by millions of volunteers. In Spain, buildings come from the Spanish Cadastre and relief from the Instituto Geográfico Nacional; elsewhere, relief comes from SRTM and general coastlines from Natural Earth.
All of it is open data that can be used with attribution, and every map you download carries that credit. If you find a mistake in a street or a path, the best fix is to correct it in OpenStreetMap: the next map will be right, here and everywhere else.
To avoid loading those projects' public servers, PlotMyMap downloads the data by region and keeps it on its own server; the background map and the place search are its own too.
How it is funded
The tool can be used for free and without signing up. Computing maps takes real work (a map of a large city moves tens of thousands of strokes), so to pay for the server the site may show advertising.
Usage statistics and personalised advertising are only switched on if you accept them in the cookie notice. The details are in the privacy policy, linked at the foot of every page.
Contact
For questions, bugs, ideas or anything else: info@plotmymap.com. Everything gets read, and many improvements to the tool have come from maps that did not look right.
If you make something nice with a PlotMyMap map (a poster, a present, a plotter drawing), we would love to see it.