OT: Good map print server on the web?

Those links do not work with Thunderbird, it only opens an email window.

Are we ever going to drag you into the 21st Century ?:-) Thunderbird is not a fit NEWS reader.

Go to a.b.s.e to view. ...Jim Thompson

It is actually a very nice email software. Ok, maybe not perfect for newsgroups but I like things integrated.

Can't, my news server carries no binaries. I never bothered to get a service with binaries because >>95% of Usenet users have no access, so there is no point anymore sharing schematic ideas that way.

From what orifice did you pull that number from ?:-)

If you insist on being cheap, stop whining and go sit in the corner and suck your thumb.

I pay $8/mo for Giganews. Always there. Always works. Unlike the ISP "provided" news. ...Jim Thompson

I use Firefox and just hit the print button in the browser. I use to grab the screen and print using paint but that's too cumbersome.

without

So how many participants on s.e.d. are left on a.b.s.e.?

Care to start a poll? You'll be very surprised.

I am also using a 3rd party since my ISP dumped first binaries, then all of Usenet.

I tried the same because the print routine in Google Maps makes a bad print even worse. Problem: I only have B/W printers and on both the street lines are not visible. Because Google changed that in a nonsensical way, to a border between very light gray and white.

In the good old days when Google Maps still worked it printed nice contrasty lines on the sides of each street.

This works: Get map from MapQuest, CTRL-PrintScreen, into IrfanView. Cut fluff away so only map remains. Hit sharpen once, on local maps it may be needed twice. Then convert to grayscale. Adjust in preview window so it fills as much of the page as possible since bigger is better. This produces a printout that is not quite as good as in the old days but has enough contrast for driving.

Don't use the print button, use file, print on Firefox. On my hp P2015dn I can even make out the lot lines ;-) ...Jim Thompson

I seem to recall saying just that! ;-)

Well, almost but not quite :-)

I had figured out the export drill before. However, transcoding to B/W there did not help. What makes the difference is the high-pass filtering ("sharpen"). The large area freeway maps only need that once but inside the city twice seems to sometimes work better. Without this the map is almost as poorly readable as with Google Maps.

I think I have to dig out some of the image processing routines from my old ultrasound days, they are much better than graphics programs. Unfortunately those do not have any user interface to write home about.

I am. news:alt.binaries.schematics.electronics is still active, but you can't see it.

I've posted a link many times to a read only archive that you can use, but I'm not going to look for it again.

Sorry, I should have been more specific about my comment: "Print to a graphic file format and convert to B&W *there* -- instead of letting MS and your printer decide how to map colors, scale (or NOT scale! ) the image, etc." And, in particular, about SnagIt's capabilities.

Once you have captured the image (which, as I said, can be just by "printing" it to the SnagIt printer if you don't want to "capture" it from the screen), SnagIt allows you to REPLACE COLORS selectively. For a photograph of a *person*, this would be useless. *But*, to convert the lackluster colors that google maps uses into BOLDER colors -- e.g., the beige/yellow that it likes to use for roads into SOLID BLACK -- it's *perfect*!

And, since google uses the same colors repeatedly, this is easy to apply (even if they cycled through a set of random, equally bad colors, you could use the eyedropper tool to pick the color that you want to replace and the color to act as its replacement; you can do any number? of these substitutions... one or two is usually more than enough).

This gives you one-stop shopping for printing and conversion (and has a quick startup time -- especially if you use it as your normal screen capture utility) as well as for creating exportable documents (e.g., PDF's, PNG's, etc.)

I think they're more consistent, release to release -- DeLorme went back and forth on whether they used their own maps or someone else's and how much attention they paid to keeping the maps up to date; some of the releases were quite disappointing.

If you go to enough hotels while you're at clients, a $50/mo smartphone bill might pay for itself if you no longer have to spend $8.95/day on WiFi like some "fancy" hotels charge!

I'm in New York this week (returning tomorrow), and I have have to say that while your Californian highways are no picnics, they're worse in New York here. The road system is just so darned dense -- I honestly think that unless you have a second person to play navigator, if you haven't been here before you're a safer with a GPS system than trying to go from paper maps/printing directions: You end up making a lot of turns/exits at highway spends in a very short amount of time, and you often find that the printed directions don't get them quite right anyway.

(For instances... some of the smaller highways are "all turns from right lane," so even though there's a stop light at an intersection, to turn left you have to cross the intersection and then turn into a cloverleaf sort-of-thing that'll route you back back -- to the same intersection again -- but with the original "left" now in front of you. This is all at street level, yet Google maps gets confused and things the cloverleafs are on-ramps and hence gives slightly wrong directions.)

---Joel

And it's (sadly) often easy for the GPS to decide that one is on an adjacent highway and so provide the correct routing but for the wrong road. That is one thing that I do miss about the old Delorme plus a laptop in the passenger seat: it had a "breadcrumb trail" that was the actual estimated position instead of an icon that snaps to the calculated road. Wonder whether any of the current GPS navigators or smartphones have an option to show the raw position?

Yeah, you ned to zoom in until they have names before they can easly been seen on a printout,

The amazing thing is that "cheap" hotels (say, 3-star) usually have free WiFi. Forget the room rates, the top tier want your first born for WiFi (and parking, and...). Nuts! The beds are the same.

But your point is well taken, I don't need to worry about WiFI anymore. I take it with me (except that my laptop doesn't talk WPA2 and that's the only dialect the phone does).

I see your problem. I always print the satellite view though. Plenty of contrast :-)