Prepress-quality printing from Google Earth

google earthpdf

disclaimer: Google Earth newbie question

I have a last-minute request from a client who needs to print out PDFs (for pre-press) with custom maps (ranging from continental down to sub-national size) and pins and city names for specific cities.

I can easily produce a klm file with the cities and coordinates, which displays fine in Google Earth.

Is there a built-in zoom-in and print function in Google Earth that would output a basic political map, represent cities as dots (being able to size them up or down to reflect custom population densities would be a plus) and label them with a custom city name?

Alternatively, is there an app or add-on that would let me do that?

Best Answer

Printing maps using material from Google Earth is a violation of copyright and Googles guidelines for the maps. You should buy a license to use a commercially available map or find maps without copyright restrictions. Perhaps openstreetmaps might suit your needs - be aware that they have their own open source-style licensing model which may not be suitable for your needs.

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Google Maps – Custom Sized Maps with Street Names

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.

Find Ocean Depth at a Particular Point in the World (using Google Earth)

Google Maps provides an elevation API endpoint. It will return a negative value for coordinates corresponding to points on the ocean

Best Answer

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Google Maps – Custom Sized Maps with Street Names

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