Mapping Toolbox

Printing Maps

Maps are often printed at a size that makes objects on paper a particular fraction of their real size. The ratio of the mapped and real object sizes is called scale, and it is usually notated with a colon as "1:1,000,000" or "1:24,000". Another way of specifying scale is to call out the printed and real lengths, for example "1 inch = 1 mile."

You can specify the printed scale using the paperscale function. It modifies the size of the printed area on the page to match the scale. If the resulting dimensions are larger than your paper, you can reduce the amount of empty space around the map using tightmap, zoom, or panzoom, and by changing the axes position to fill the figure. This also reduces the amount of memory needed to print with the zbuffer (raster image) renderer. Be sure to set the paper scale last. For example:

• set(gca,'Units','Normalized','Position',[0 0 1 1])
  tightmap
  paperscale(1,'in', 5,'miles')
  

You can also check the size and extent of text and the relative position of axes using previewmap. This function resizes the figure to the printed size. For more information on printing see the Basic Printing and Exporting section of the MATLAB graphics documentation.

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