OCAD / Photoshop - Printing out maps to scale.

[pyrat]

In the age of electronic maps I often get maps as ocad then export them to jpeg and find a cheap colour laser to print out maps for training.

Im running into problems with the scale of the maps when printing out, do any designer / cartographer types have any tips?

I export the map to a high quality jpeg in ocad. It need to be an image because I am not going to install ocad when printing it out. (internet cafe)

I load it up in photoshop and because the image is massive I scale to fit media, in this case a random paper size bigger than a4 but smaller than a3, poster size I think.

The result is a map of about 1:8000 when I was hoping for 1:10000. Im probably missing something pretty basic, if anyone has any other ways of doing it please let me know as I like maps to scale!

Cheers,
Ally

[MarkC]

If you want to stick with a jpeg intermediate, you could measure the size of the odd paper size and draw a box in OCAD of the appropriate size (allowing for whatever margins are imposed in Photoshop) - when you scale to fit media this will then end up with the right size.

However you are probably better off exporting from OCAD to Postscript files instead which keeps the maps in vector format and includes a page size description - anywhere graphics-focused enough to have Photoshop should have something else able to handle Postscript. [before I started printing my own maps I used to email them to a commercial printer in ps format, as they could not use OCAD files]

[brooner]

or if you're using a usb stick then you'll probably have space to install ocad on that which works fine, then you can just print straight from that.

[Paul Frost]

I found the best option was to convert them to PDF's (most computers have Adobe Acrobat and even works on Macs).
If you don't have the facility already, get PDF995.
This adds a printer to your list of printers.
In OCAD just go to PRINT and select PDF995 as the printer, then set the properties. In Advanced you can select the print size and DPI (300 is fine).
When you OK it, you give it a name and where to save it.
When you print the PDF make sure that you have the scale set to 100%. Because the PDF printer doesn't need margins, make sure that the map has some space around it to allow for printer not being able to print to the edges of the paper.
I used this method for EckO local events before we got a laser printer of our own.