Google Maps – Custom Sized Maps with Street Names

geocodinggoogle earthgoogle mapskml

I'm currently geocoding a number of addresses, all contained within the same city, and I would like to eventually be able to print out the map, with these addresses marked, of the city.

Now, I would like this map to be entirely usable, once printed, for navigating the city. In Google Maps, all the necessary street names are available, however, if I zoom out far enough to see the whole city, only major streets are marked with their names.

So my question is, is there a way to display a KML file on Google Maps, with a larger map, but at a specific zoom level (the zoom level that displays the necessary street names)?

EDIT: I can use Google Earth too if that helps with the zoom level difficulties, but even in Google Earth the small streets become obscured as I zoom out.

Best Answer

The only way I've found to achieve this is by creating an HTML file that creates a huge iframe and loads your Google Maps page inside it:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
  <head>
    <title></title>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
  </head>
  <body>
    <iframe width="4000" height="4000" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" 
     marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="http://maps.google.com/maps">
    </iframe>
  </body>
</html>

Replace http://maps.google.com/maps in the code above with the URL generated in Google Maps when you click the link icon, and then inside Paste HTML to embed in website. Don't copy the entire <iframe ... code, just the src of the generated iframe tag.

This will create a 4000px by 4000px map. Change the width and height parameters above if that's not big enough (or too big). If your browser tries to paginate the map rather than resize it down to one page, try using a screen-capture browser extension to save a screengrab of the entire 4000x4000 page as an image, then print the image file.

A caveat, though: printing a 4000x4000 map on letter paper will produce street names that are far too small to read. In general Google's labels are sized appropriately for the zoom size, which more or less correlates with printing at that size/zoom. To print a larger (in width/height, not zoom level) map and still be able to read the labels, you'll need to print on large paper like a poster.

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