Discussion: Printing quality

Worst ever. Not acceptable. Sorry. Looks like rogainers are ahead on this one.

In 1995 first-generation inkjets could do better. Sorry again.

Considerably better today, almost legible at 1:15k. Still not quite there.

Fine at 1:10k. Chatted with Ed, he said the problem happened when the map was rasterized at a medium-low dpi. The printer then aliased the raster, but somehow the resulting effect only showed with the black color. Fine black lines (~0.15 mm and narrower) got clobbered, with thickness modulatedly varying from none to double: a sure problem with brown-fill paths. Some paths had almost no border between them and the yellow, so were extremely hard to read. (This on top of wrong colors, but correct colors have been too much to expect for over a decade.)

Same-thickness brown lines, however, didn't seem to get aliased, which saved the Long and the Middle. Or, more likely, the different constituent colors of brown aliased in non-dependent ways, so the average line thickness stayed more or less the same.

Moral to future organizers: DO NOT RASTERIZE YOUR MAP unless you know exactly what you are getting into. We do rasterize (to be able to bring in logos and other raster art). The first time I did it, at a dpi much higher than what was allegedly used this weekend, I saw aliasing on 0.07 mm urban pavement boundaries. Then I tried to match the resolution with the printer's native resolution, and never saw aliasing again. Crisp as they should be (to within the printer's limits).

Vlad: what program are they/you use for creating the competition maps? Is it Condes? Ocad?

The reason I'm asking is because "create overprint effect" in those programs--which I think requires rasterizing. I notice that these maps don't use that and the purple knocks everything out. Is overprint effect not being used these days? It seems important to me still be doing that because you can then still see _some_ of the detail through the purple.

Yes, my 7-minute error on the Long was to some very small extent due to the circle covering a two-line marsh. The lack of cutting or transparency is so common nowdays, I don't complain about them anymore. (And I myself forgot to cut a line or set the transparency correctly once at a premium event, so there.)

Ed has the process down much better than us because he uses Illustrator for final output. You can layer/transparentize things pretty much however you want in Illustrator. We don't have Illustrator and use Photoshop for final output. We also have an ancient OCAD, so our recipe can be made simpler for those who have later OCADs in which layering/transparentizing capability is more powerful than in OCAD 8.

Whatever you do, DON'T EVER PRINT STRAIGHT OUT OF CONDES, or generate pre-final output (i.e. any output that contains the map) out of Condes. Condes will re-render your OCAD file and its rendering mechanism is slightly different from that of OCAD. Not worse or better, just different. What this means is that dashes, cliff teeth, etc. will be in slightly, or not so slightly, different places—up to 180° out of phase vs. OCAD's own rendering. The mapper/drafter may have spent some time punctuating those dashed/dotted lines in OCAD so that they look just right; you are defeating that by rendering in Condes.

(continued...)

So, the overprint/transparency effect is not necessarily related to rasterizing. That is, you can create it without explicitly rasterizing your map (but you can also do it in post-process, working with rasters). In OCAD, just open one map with another map as a template, and check the "View transparent" checkbox.

So what we do to create the final output is:

(1) Make your courses in Condes. Cut the circles and lines in Condes.

(2) Output from Condes to OCAD. Sorry I don't have Condes in front of me right now, I can't manualize the exact sequence of menu items for this step.

(3) We sometimes do another step, and whether it is needed or useful highly depends on your physical print process and to a lesser degree, on the type of terrain. This step is to make contour lines (actually, all brown features) transparent. Ed goes further and creates a sequence of layers from the original OCAD map, each with some colors; some are on top of others and some are transparent, some aren't. You'd have to ask him for the exact alchemy. For us, it's either just leaving the original OCAD map as is, or splitting it into two: only brown color and everything but brown. (In OCAD, Export by symbol, Delete by symbol.)

For our printers, which are either cheap and slow inkjets or expensive and slow inkjets, having transparent contours works well (better than having non-transparent contours) for terrain that has a lot of contours, few black features, and a lot of grades of green. For this kind of terrain, having the contours modulate their color as they go through green creates a better visual impact than having them retain the same color. But if the terrain has a lot of black, the relative darker color of the contours starts to confuse things. This is especially noticeable in campus/urban terrain, dark contours through grey buildings don't look so good at all.

(4) Open your courses, exported from Condes, in OCAD and make changes that you couldn't do in Condes. I like fonts that are sometimes/usually misrendered in Condes, for example (they would look OK relative to the size of the box in Condes, but in OCAD and in the print output, they spill over the boxes of the description sheets). I also like to type things into the top of the description sheet that aren't doable in Condes. Also in this step, make sure the purple color is correct in the exported file, it can't be 100% magenta.

(5) Open your 2 or 3 OCAD files as follows: The bottom-most template is the original map (less brown color, perhaps), then the brown-only (if exists) is a transparent map on top of that, then the courses are a transparent map on top of the other one or two.

(6) Rasterize. In OCAD 8, the only raster export that works is TIFF, other ones are all broken. Photoshop has some problems with some combinations of checkboxes in OCAD's TIFF output, you should select a combination that works in Photoshop. USE THE NATIVE DPI OF THE PRINTER. For all latest Epsons, this is either 720 or 1440 dpi. At 1440, you will have very large files and your computer may choke. It's OK to use a 720 export for a 1440-native printer, I haven't seen problems.

(7) Open the TIFF in Photoshop as background, layer your logos on top of that, type up some credits, etc.

(8) Either create a PDF in Photoshop (it's a non-lossy PDF, so the file will be huge, hundreds of MB for a Letter-size page, more for bigger), or print straight from Photoshop if the printer is hooked up to the layout computer.

Voila: Beautiful maps!

What is the meaning of a contour line passing through a grey building?

Same as the sound of one hand clapping.

Contour lines through grey buildings are there to show the general slope of the land. On urban sprint maps where much of the map is buildings, if you cut the contours at the building edges you would only have short sections crossing each street, and would have no idea what things are the same level.

@ jj "To emphasize the 3-dimensional effect of the contour line image, contour lines shall be represented as continuous lines through all symbols, also building (526.1) and canopy (562.2)." - ISSOM 2007

@ printing - I noticed the 1:15000 WRE Long maps were perhaps the best printing - better than the Middle WRE the next day. Though strangely, the women's WRE maps - but not the Men's - showed extra-wide form-lines - same width as small trails, and perhaps 2x as thick as the near-by non-form-line contours. Not sure how this happens on modern maps where you just say "print at scale xyz..."

All 3 days I had difficulties reading even with my magnifying glass. Especially all paved and unpaved trails on sprint map and all contour details both on long and middle Red-Y. Comparing a copy of 1998's offset printed map at 1:15000 it looks better vs. 2014's at 1:10000. I am not sure if this is related to colors or width of contour lines or line aliasing or all combined.

Also cutting circles and lines where they obscure important features and detail or certain transparency of course circles and lines is nice to have at important events.

Very much appreciated Tundra/Desert hints on printing!

P.S. I wonder if Red-Y long control 6 was about 20-30 m lower than shown on the map. Or it is my imagination and those extra 8 minutes left investigating the area are gone in vein :)

P.P.S. It was fun weekend and many thanks to all organizers for putting it together! I hope that future event organizers are learning a lot from this discussion. I am!

What is the CP number for Red Y CP 6?

"I hope that future event organizers are learning a lot from this discussion."

Yes---that the expectations are for perfection and if you don't achieve it, you will be slammed!

With that said, I do appreciate T/D's detailed procedure of how he does his "beautiful maps".

By the way, I thought the printing was just fine.

Not necessarily for perfection. Just for something that approaches what was possible and regularly achieved in the 1980s. No need to face the competitors, who are already two decades older on average than in the 1980s, with unreadable maps. Navigation is already a challenge, no need to add to it.

Our printing output is certainly not perfect and noticeably worse than what offset or a higher-end printer yields, but it is good enough, except for in certain types of terrain.

I thought it was pretty good for having been done on an ink jet printer at our house...

Contour lines through grey buildings are there to show the general slope of the land.

I'm not questioning that it's in the spec, or even that it's a good idea. Just musing on the fact that it's showing the level of land that doesn't (and in some cases, never did) exist.

Is it normal practice / acceptable in the US to print maps for important events on (what I'm now assuming is) a home printer? Seems odd, as the quality will be in no way what's necessary.

In the past, before lasers got so good, we did a lot of tweaking with pigment ink inkjets and got quite good results. The biggest problem (in my personal experience) was that one map took 2-4 minutes to print, and hours to dry (lots of floor space). With a laser we can get 20-40 maps in a minute.

@ Tooms: LKohn was being sarcastic. Can't say I blame her after all the hard work she put in. To be clear, the maps were most assuredly not done on a home inkjet.

@Wyatt re printing. I can tell you exactly how that happened. Test prints done a month ago looked fine. But the final maps for the long course (1;15000 for both men and women) done on the same printer from the same file were totally unacceptable. They were bagged and sealed, ready to go when I inspected them on Thursday. Linda and I spent Friday morning at the printer, trying from several different formats but several things were completely off. Browns were too dark, contour lines set to IOF specs were way too thick, and several symbols (small gully, narrow marsh, vegetation boundary) were printing so fine as to be almost invisible. After a few hours, many test prints, and finally manually adjusting symbol specs in OCAD, we were finally able to print the maps used in the competition (1:15000 maps for long course). I take full responsibility that we missed adjusting the form lines in the final version of the women's map. I thought we'd fixed them once, but we had to keep re-fixing things to get the final prints and it got missed. A good lesson to check the final printed maps earlier than two days before the race, even though earlier tests looked perfectly fine.

P.S. I wonder if Red-Y long control 6 was about 20-30 m lower than shown on the map. Or it is my imagination and those extra 8 minutes left investigating the area are gone in vein :)

This is correct, and also confirmed by my GPS track. Just did not want to break into that lovefest. In fact mapping this feature as not-in-scale depression is, imo, a poor choice (same as for #16 on Red-Y). There is a whole lot more in fieldchecking than just copypasting lidar contours for this kind of terrain with elements of landslide.

Hah!! I wondered (clumsily) if last-minute alterations suddenly ended with an urgent print to a course or few! There is indeed no way an inkjet could last the distance - but I can remember doing so for 'training exercises' and hoping like mad the plastic bag would hang in there! (I shouldn't type comments before coffee and after a weekend of orienteering, long drives and an early morning hard ride :-)

Pigment inks are fairly waterproof. The paper tends to be the weak link for pigment ink and lasers. Inkjet tends to do better with creasing, but that's a bad idea either way. The standard pigment ink is Epson Durabrite. It runs a tiny bit, but nothing like a dye-based inkjet printer. Trust me, it's better than you think.

Epson pigment inks have been around since late 1990s. They are waterproof and take less than 30 seconds to dry. Since it takes a lot longer than 30 s for a map to print, by simply abstaining to touch a printed map until the next one is out, you cover all the drying that needs to happen, nothing ever spread on the floor.

done on the same printer from the same file

I would vouch the difference was the introduction of rasterization into the process...

I was using coated laser paper. It took hours to dry but had insane durability to folding compared to a typical inkjet paper. I could have dried them faster, but it wasn't necessary.

Great weekend and the maps I used were satisfactory. One bit of advice all course designers should keep in mind is to move the control numbers around so they are visible. Don't just accept the default from your design software. Examples: Green Y Long control 3 was not visible to me as I left control 2. The circle is visible, but the numeral is obscured by road, a small clearing and dense contour lines. While running, my eye was caught by the long line to 4 and off I went. Quite a shock at download. Didn't seem to bother anyone else. Not the first time I've skipped a flag!

A question. On the Green Sprint, control 2 at the north end of the bridge used the tunnel clue. Same for control 14. Would "bridge" in column C and the "underneath" clue in G be more appropriate in these situations? There were two participants looking for the flag on top of that end of the bridge when I got there.

All this discussion of map quality makes me cringe when my club talks about hosting an A meet. With modern technology, why should this be so difficult?

makes me cringe when my club talks about hosting an A meet

I lobbied my club to go B over A since I have thin skin and read AP.

BoulderBob, for the controls on the trails under the bridges, I think our reasoning was to describe the control location as accurately as possible. From IOF: "The purpose of a control description is to give greater precision to the picture given by the map of the control feature and the location of the control flag in relation to this feature." "Beneath" is not very precise for long (and/or wide) things like bridges, it is kind of like just having "trail", normally one needs something more like "pipeline junction beneath". A tunnel is described as “a way under roads etc.” I have never been to GVP, but I assume the trail is the most reasonable (only?) “way under” and the added information about which end of the tunnel can also be used. Of course, “end of bridge” could also have been used, but that would mean a different control location.

Control descriptions can be so astonishingly difficult some times. This is one of those really tough ones. I think there were two difficulties with it: 1) almost nobody knows the "tunnel" control description (this was the main problem I think), and 2) there was no tunnel marked on the map i.e. the parallel dotted lines (not a big problem, IMO).

The issue in this case was particularly troublesome because you could reach the centre of the circle and not understand why you couldn't see the flag. What I saw was several people in this situation - and often they "caught on" when they saw other people dropping over the side of the bridge. This added a bit of "luck" to their results, depending on how long they had to wait for someone to provide them with this clue. (In contrast I've had problems with control descriptions that really didn't make a lot of difference, due to high visibility of the control)

It was unfortunate that a number of people were so confused, but I'm not sure what else the organizers could have done. Perhaps reminded people in the meet notes of the tunnel description symbol - but that's a bit of a slippery slope. I think I might have moved the control slightly, assuming I was able to anticipate the issue ;-)

Really we just need to have more sprint races so we know all the symbols!

To start this rant on my side, I will say the following: only one who does nothing makes no mistakes. Big thanks to all who dare, without you this sport would be dead.
There are complains, and there is healthy criticism, and that makes those who dare and listen better organizers, better course setters, better course consultants (shot at Jonas :), etc, etc.
That's said, great thanks to all who made National Champs happened, it took more than just ROC, I recognized volunteers from Buffalo, CNYO and even Orienteering USA ED.
Now comments, starting with start: all start crew volunteers shell keep the talk to a minimum, conversation shell be limited to only aid the runners, within the limitation of the rules. It is a boring job, I understand the desire, I myself like to talk a lot, but please, not at the start line.
Map printing - all days. I believe that we all are big procrastinators, it is not uncommon for the maps to be printed just a day before the race, technology permits. I am a printing professional, do it for living, and I had my share of mishaps in that department. Without going into all probable scenarios, what goes wrong, most of it caused by dilettantes at work. Mappers who change map symbols without consulting with IOF symbols, just to fit the situation; futzing around with map and drafting scale in OCAD without remotely understanding the consequences, playing with map colors in OCAD to look good on your home printer first, exporting OCAD files into different formats without proper understanding of each conversion strength and drawbacks. This is just a tip of the iceberg, that why it goes so wrong so often, even on national level events. It is my believe, that we need one service company funded by Orienteering USA in the beginning, than being completely profitable, for clubs to order map printing for all events. Easy web interface to place orders with OCAD or Condes files, e-commerce. That would of course require for all of us who love the sport and organize events, stop being procrastinators, but on a plus side - predictable and consistent quality of printing, and therefore increased quality of many events, all around the country and significantly less threads like the one we are in right now.

Course setting last weekend:
Sprint great venue - small comment on courses - too many controls for this type of the terrain, may be 20-25% less, more rout choices.

I am the guilty party on weak announcing quality, we did not realize that acoustics of the canopy made us non-legible by results screens, until it was too late. For future event directors, and that applied to sprint and middle venues last week, plan the arena setup that announcers can see the runners closer as they punch last control, spectators controls, etc, very difficult to do it just of the screens, plus software still has some glitches and I had no live data, coming to me on the screen at periods of time, being closer to action would help.

Long course: I will talk only about the one I ran: Red-Y - design was great, some excellent long legs, as they should be on a Long. Control #6 was mismapped, by about 2 contour lines and ~ 30 meters; unfortunately, Lindsey did not have enough experience to question Mark's mapping, and move this control location to more reliable feature near by. You live and learn, even the great ones make mistakes. Second comment: this course was advertised as having 395 m climb, I was very conservative on extra climb, and I counted 510 meters on my side, There 2 points to make here: this is not mountain terrain, it shell not gain that much climb on 9.6 km course. Even for Elite IOF recommends to keep it below 5 %, M45 is far from M21+, be merciful :). Jonas, this is a shot at you too :). And dear course setters count your climb properly, it does not take that long - 5 to 10 min / course.

I will leave out middle course, Red-Y, to spare the feelings of a novice course setter. He shell learn from Glen Tryson, how to set interesting course in such technical terrain. (Morrow Lake, May 2013).

we need one service company

We would benefit from that for most other things, too

Entries/Data: Eventor (and one person to run it)
Results: Fund Ed and Valerie to travel around
Promotion: Centralized, funded
Production: Yes indeed

... if only the market were willing to pay!

Map production is outsourced already, for most part, after modest initial investments, cost of printing will not increase, may be the opposite, the only extra are the shipping charges. Lease on $25 000 Canon Laser printer / copier is very low monthly fee, if you buy it with consumables and cost would be 30 to 40 cents per 11x17" print depending on paper stock, that's cost of lease and consumables (paper, toner) for the company. I found out that prices of paper, bought wholesale depend only on weight of the paper, not too much on quality, retailers (Staples, Kinko's) gouge prices for that completely out of proportion.
Add labor to cost above and $1 for 11x17" print is not a cost increase at all.
All you need is volume for that to be sustainable. The printer is modular and would fit in someone basement, to avoid rent :) .
I used it for team trials at Harriman SP in 2010, check the quality of printing if you have those maps, and in secret, I will tell that was done from scanned old maps with courses overlaid in Photoshop.

Here is to proof what said above, my data was 5 years old , it is cheaper now:
http://www.printershowcase.com/11x17-color-lasers....

in secret

Well that wasn't much of a secret... we all knew the original OCAD/Illustrator files were lost.

The original files were in Microstation and Freehand, I think. But it's all safely in 0CAD now.

As Greg as correctly pointed out, quality printing is the product of a process that starts long before the meet. If you start thinking about it just days before the race, you are way behind.

A quality print job starts off with a properly drafted map, where line widths are correct, minimum spacings have been respected, and line smoothness and edge matching between area fills and lines have been done with precision. From there you need to choose a good dull coated paper, not too bright white, not glossy, not too thick, 110gsm is perfect. Then you need to think about the pre press process you will use, and what your color management scheme is. This is where your files are converted into press ready data, colors are specified for your output medium, overprinting is considered, logos and sheet layout are designed. The last step, the printer, is in some ways less important than the preparation steps. Many options for good printers/presses exist with tradeoffs between quality, cost and speed. I prefer to work with a print shop staffed by professionals that runs an Indigo digital offset press, but I pay for it, but also have the options to run spot colors (CMYK+Brown) High quality inkjet production can be done at home, but is slow and has high consumable cost. Professional laser printers can work well, but you have to be careful to not end up with a shiny surface that flakes off as the paper folds (choose your stock carefully!) That $100 printer sitting next to your home computer should never be an option.

If you don't follow some form of that process, a good print is just luck, not a guarantee. I would prefer to see test prints early in the planning process, even getting veters out on production printed maps if possible so they can consider not only the map accuracy and course quality, but how legible the important features along the route are.

The maps this weekend were clearly not up to a national championship level of expectation, and definitely not what I would expect from a WRE. I think the problems go all the way back to the map drafting of contours, the paper selected was way too glossy, and the prepress process did not supply the required quality to the final printer. The printer may have been fine for this use if a good process was used to deliver data to it. Trying to say that the maps were fine is just ignorant of what a well printed map looks like, or oblivious to the fine details of the map when running. My expectations are very high in this area, only because I have been though all of this spending hundreds of hours learning everything from printing technology to color management, to learning a lot of graphic design skills to build my prepress workflow.

I don't want to call out ROC and complain too loudly about it though, as from a lot of directions this is a hard process, and doesn't have much support. There isn't anything coming from a national level to direct what the expectations are or support clubs when they need help. The software all conspires against you sometimes to make it hard to get the results you expect without being an expert in many different packages, and some workflows require expensive software that many people who are expected to produce the maps don't have access to. It should also be part of the job of an independent event controller or IOF advisor to verify that this is all going to plan. If at the last minute it still isn't working, then they need to somehow have resources available to call on to help fix the problem.

One other comment about production workflow is that if you find yourself changing features sizes on the ocad file to try and get a correct output, you are just treating a symptom of the problem, and need to look deeper. Either your printer is crap, or your stock is absorbing too much ink and bleeding, or your prepress workflow has broken your file.

Clubs should not let printing be a impediment to hosting an A meet. It is the same as designing the courses and the map. The best way to prevent complaints is to do it so well that there is no question it was excellent. If you misplace a control it is absolutely sure that there will be complaints, the same expectations should apply to the core part of our sport we run with in the woods, the map and the printed copy in your hand.

So how do we fix this?
Not everyone needs any help. I've seen some very good printing from clubs (DVOA comes to mind), but I also see crap a lot, especially at the local meet level. In some way the expectations need to be better understood by everyone, and enforced. Its stupid to enforce anything though until we have a program in place to help out and educate anyone who wants to get better results.

I don't think a printer in someones basement is the answer on a national level. Maybe an investment in documenting workflows that produce good results, and an option for clubs to just pay a premium and send in their files to some approved consultants and print shops. The Indigo presses I refer to cost 6 figures, and print hundreds of thousands of sheets a month. Even if you printed every O map in the country for a year on one it wouldn't keep it busy. I have a very good relationship with the print shop that I use, with the ability to walk in or call up the design department, or press operators and talk through issues with someone who has years of training and frequently a degree in this field. This is more like it was in the days of spot color offset printing. The ability to print at a corner copy shop has created an impression that all that is needed is to click a button and pack up the prints.

I don't see anything changing without some dedicated people, and some leadership from OUSA to make this a priority. Maybe fixing our immediate event management and production problems should have been on the list of strategic plan goals.

Documenting workflow options that produce good results is an international issue.

Once upon a time, august members of a secret guild roamed the forests of America. Craftsmen and artists, these "loners" were poorly understood. Some burghers thought they were men of myth, but the common folk knew better.

These men (they were men, for whatever reason--don't crucify me for this) wielded magical wands of graphite and metal. They flitted through dimensions that mortals could not access; they saw and understood aspects of reality that the unwashed didn't fathom. But, they were able to rend the concrete into an abstract, transcending the babel of text-based language, offering a new lingua franca.

Some allied themselves with the members of another quixotic band--draftsmen, with steady hand and calm nerve, were wizards of vellum and mylar and other mystical substances.

These men dedicated themselves to a craft, toiling in obscurity, striving towards perfection. Pride, the respect of their peers, and a sacred duty to preserve the learning of previous generations drove them. It took a heavy toll on many. They were decidedly uncommon souls.

These men had a church. It was the same as ours: the glades and valleys, dotted with thickets, ornamented by pools, punctuated by cataracts, sonifed by birds. But, they also had a tabernacle in the land of Massachusetts. It was called Hamilton Newell.

Like Shangri-La, the common folk could not find it. It was but a legend. But, our guild members did. The tabernacle was full of magic, and its priests, working with the guild, produced high art.

The high art was given freely to the people. Many ingested it. Some recognized the transubstantiation, others just happily consumed and were sated.

Years passed, and the guild members started to recede from the world. The tabernacle was lost. The scriptures were forgotten.

But, the people were happy. They became their own priests. They didn't need a tabernacle--they had science and "magical" devices in their own homes. They were empowered, freed, and masters of their own destiny.

Still, after a while, some people wondered what happened to art? What does it mean? Is there something more? What have we lost when we have no religion but our own indulgence? The crowds bickered and complained, but no one knew a way forward. There was no way home. Eden was gone, the priests defrocked, and the craftsmen faceless tax drivers in some no name town. Alas.

j-man forgets the magical fairy nymphs of Oxbow Press, whom, I am told, were not men.

Hey! Last time I saw Ed, he was driving something other than a taxi. And was he even born when Hamilton-Newell closed up shop?

I think attackpoint's discussions are getting better by the minute, lately. Yea, weed out the evil!
Thank you, j-man, loved you piece!

Ah, j-man, that was beautiful.

I though the printing was fine.....or course it can always be better.

The first time I walked into Newell's was probably in 1976. I was looking for a place to print the first color map I'd done, Forest Park in Springfield, and I had a copy of the original Bear Brook map with me. First question to Norm, can you produce the quality I need?

He looked at it for a moment and then pointed to what looked like a piece of abstract art on the wall. "That," he said, "went through the press some 40 times for all the different colors. I think we can manage just 5 times."

Turns out they had the perfect set-up for printing O' maps, these old Heidelburg presses well suited to high quality and relatively small print runs.

And, one thing I never told him, his price was a good bit lower than I was expecting to have to pay.

And so began a long and productive romance. In time he handled printing not just for NEOC but for many other clubs around the country. At some point a couple of the woman that ran the presses branched off into their own company, Oxbow Press, and the quality was even better. JJ or Pat Dunlavy could tell you much more about all that. I just know that the WOC-93 maps were superb, and the relay maps, with all the possible combinations, well, I think Pat spent the whole night in there making sure everything was right.

Time has moved on, of course. There are faster and easier and cheaper ways of doing things. But those old offset maps printed on a proper press on the right paper by skilled workers, they were things of beauty.

Pat and I were at Newell very late that night that the relay maps were printed, long after the employees were gone, although the actual press work was done by 5 PM. When Oxbow Press moved to Hatfield and we could work with them directly, I was elated. Maps drafted in 0CAD and printed by them were the pinnacle of goodness, exemplified by some of the 1000-Day maps. Some things have gotten better (e.g. georeferencing) and some have gotten worse, but those days are gone forever.

New Epson EcoTank printers cost more up front, but the ink lasts for years:

WSJ: Epson Kills the Printer Ink Cartridge

Unfortunately, all but the most expensive business model use dye inks, so they're not waterproof. The pigment-ink business model "WorkForce Pro WF-R4640" is $1200, and I'm not sure it's even large format. Claimed 20,000 color sheets, so figure maybe 5000 maps?

Consumer Reports: Can Epson EcoTank printers deliver cheap ink?

The maximum paper size of the WF-R4640 is: 8.5" x 47.2", which is about 21.6cm x 119.9cm.

You'd think such a printer would be able to handle 11" wide paper...