Printing charts

[Hoghead]

Perhaps my search skills are not very good...................

I want to print full size charts from open cpn, or directly from the downloaded NZ chart base. Ideally I would like to take a USB stick to a graphics house and have then print out the charts in colour and high resolution

At the same time I am trying to learn open cpn and while I see how to print on my dinky home printer I do not see a way to do this full size?

[Hoghead]

A bit of Googling gives me a BSB chart converter to yield tif and png files

BSB Reader download | SourceForge.net

Seemed too simple?
Off to the large format printer they go!!

[Sandibar]

I've printed "charts" from Navionics, but found them of little use without scale indication or lat/long markings + no info on, and strange chart projection. Can you somehow include those when printing from OCPN and is the projection useful when trasferred to large scale print?

[Hoghead]

The bsb file is the standard ENC chart format so should be fine

The tif files look fine when converted from bsb and I just emailed them to the graphics house for high quality printing on A0 (841 x 1189mm) waterproof paper
Back in a couple of days and will let you know

These are 6 MB files to too large to post here

[verkerkbr]

Originally Posted by Hoghead

Perhaps my search skills are not very good...................

I want to print full size charts from open cpn, or directly from the downloaded NZ chart base. Ideally I would like to take a USB stick to a graphics house and have then print out the charts in colour and high resolution

At the same time I am trying to learn open cpn and while I see how to print on my dinky home printer I do not see a way to do this full size?

Yachting Charts are here published in the A3 format.

But it is still not possible to print direct from OpenCPN in the A3 format.

Therefore, I make a printscreen of the OpenCPN Charts I like to print and then take another image program to enlarge the image to A3 and print the Chart in the desired OpenCPN scale on my A3 printer.

If you take a good quality A3 paper, you get perfect paper Charts.

Of course it is also possible to put the printscreen images on a USB stick and go to a printshop.

Bram

[Sandibar]

Originally Posted by Hoghead

The bsb file is the standard ENC chart format so should be fine

The tif files look fine when converted from bsb and I just emailed them to the graphics house for high quality printing on A0 (841 x 1189mm) waterproof paper
Back in a couple of days and will let you know

These are 6 MB files to too large to post here

That sounds really good! Please report how the end result is.

[Hoghead]

A3 at 297 x 420mm is too small for my old eyes on a cluttered passage chart

The graphics shop is now printing high resolution A0 size, in colour, on heavy waterproof "poster stock" for 720 Thai Baht or 20.00 USD
Not cheap but given the size and that I cannot buy these here, nor where I am going, not too bad.

I imagine that grey scale, smaller, and/or less costly paper would be correspondingly cheaper

[Hoghead]

Back from the graphics house today and bloody good. Great resolution as expected and contrary to my instructions, they laminated them using a process that yielded a thin flexible waterproof chart that I can use a pencil on, and erases to boot

BTW this conversion program will also do a jpeg

[4kMike]

Hi All!
Print screen is bound to screen resolution..? and if the physical screen used is not huge.... I couldn't get a large print in good resolution...Or do you have a trick for that..?

Wondering Mike.

[nohal]

For KAPs simply extract the image using imgkap and print as big as you wish.
For vector charts all you can do is to print to file and then use a graphic editor to put the smaller pictures together.

[seandepagnier]

A plugin for printing charts might be useful as you can tape many small papers together, and also overlay many things including routes or the renderings of various plugins.


My 3d printer can be easily converted to a plotter by attaching a pen or pencil to it. This would be very interesting to try with vector graphics if we could output svg format of charts to print.

[BalticVicing]

I used Posterazor program to print charts in my home printer. They came out pretty ok.