Printable maps: a poster or a handout of your trails

A printable map is a PDF of your network that Sentinel draws from your trails, their difficulties and your public points of interest, on a basemap with shaded relief and contour lines. You print it for the parking-lot kiosk, the front desk or your visitors' pockets, and it redraws itself when your trails change.

Where: left navigation bar, under Trails → Printable maps. The entry only shows for members whose role can see printable maps; creating or editing them takes the right to manage them. Printable maps are part of the Pro plan.

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What you print

Three layouts, drawn from the same trails:

• Poster: a large format for a kiosk or a bulletin board, in 11 × 17 in, 24 × 36 in, A3 or A2, portrait or landscape. Each trail's name is written along its line, and the legend places itself in a corner where it hides no trail.
• Sheet: a Letter page in landscape, to hand out at the front desk. The map is on the left, with a numbered circle on each trail; on the right, the trail index with each trail's length, the legend, the emergency line and the QR code.
• Folded: a Letter page printed on both sides, to fold. The map fills the front; the back holds the trail index, the services (your named public points of interest, with their description), the emergency line and the QR code.

On every map: your trails in the color of their difficulty, your public points of interest as signs, the scale and north arrow, and a footer with the date and the basemap credits. Team-only points are never printed. The base map can also carry the names of towns and villages, peaks with their elevation, lakes and rivers, road names and numbers, contour line elevations and cliffs: see map details.

The list of maps

The page lists the maps of the activity chosen at the top of the screen. A place can have as many as it needs: a general map, one per sector, one for the evacuation routes.

Deleting a map also deletes its PDF, and its public link stops working.

Create a map

Click New map. The editor opens in three columns: the settings on the left, the map in the middle, the layout of the blocks on the right.

While the map redraws, an Updating the preview… notice stays at the bottom right of the screen, even when you make several changes in a row; it shows Preview up to date, then goes away.

To give the map more room, the icon to the right of Settings or Layout folds the panel into a narrow strip bearing its name; click the strip to open it again. Sentinel remembers it on your next visit.

Nothing is saved until you click Save. If you leave the page with changes, Sentinel asks what to do with them.

Layout and colors

The top of Settings sets the map's look:

• Layout: Sheet, Poster or Folded. For the poster, also choose the Size and the Orientation.
• Colors: Light or Dark. The dark version covers the whole page.
• Map color: night blue, forest, wood, gold, lake, or the color of your choice. It dresses banner and sign titles, and the blocks whose background is “Map color”.
• Relief: Flat, or 3D relief for terrain shading and contour lines. The first time, the preview can take a minute while the area's elevation downloads.

The content: title, logo, emergency line and QR code

• The logo: choose Other logo… to upload a PNG, JPG, WebP or SVG image of 10 MB or less. A PNG with a transparent background works best. The logo keeps its proportions.
• The emergency line: the number is formatted for the place's country and the map's language.
• The QR code: the list offers the activity's published trail conditions. The code opens their public page, the one your crew keeps current: a visitor who scans it knows whether a trail is open before heading out. A new map takes the first published conditions by default. If those conditions are no longer published, the map comes out without a QR code until they are published again. Other link… leads to the web page of your choice instead. See trail conditions.

The trails

The Trails section chooses what the map shows:

• Automatic: all of the activity's public trails, and new ones are added on their own. Uncheck the ones to remove, check others to add them.
• Fixed selection: only the checked trails, nothing is added on its own. It's the right choice for a sector map or the evacuation routes.

Trails are grouped by difficulty; clicking a difficulty expands it, and its checkbox checks or unchecks the whole group. Show trails of other activities, below the list, lets you add some from another activity. A private trail carries a badge: you can print it, but publishing the link of a map that contains one asks for confirmation.

Map details

The Map details section chooses what Sentinel writes on the base map, on top of your trails. Each detail has its own switch, and they are all on for a new map.

• Towns and villages: towns in larger type, then villages and hamlets.
• Peaks and their elevation: in metres, or in feet if your place counts in miles.
• Lakes and rivers: lake names, and river and stream names along their course.
• Road names and numbers: major route numbers in a small shield, and road and street names along their line.
• Contour line elevations
• Cliffs: a toothed line on the downhill side.

Names never hide a trail, a trail name, its number or a sign: when there isn't room, Sentinel leaves the name out. They come from OpenStreetMap and show in the map's language when a translation exists. Existing maps get the names at their next preview or PDF update.

Finally, the Map section sets the map language (French or English), the trail width (from 50 to 250%), the icon size of the points of interest (the legend keeps its size) and access roads in the index: they stay drawn on the map even when they're not listed.

Lay out the blocks

The map is made of blocks: the title, the emergency line, the legend, the scale, the QR code, the index and, on the sheet and the folded map, the map itself. At first, Sentinel places them on its own around the trails.

On the map in the middle:

• Click a block to choose it, drag it to move it. The handles resize it, the round handle rotates it (Shift rotates in 15° steps). Blocks snap to the margins, the center of the page and the other blocks.
• The arrow keys nudge it (Shift to go faster); Cmd/Ctrl + Z undoes.
• The mouse wheel zooms in and out around the pointer, as does a trackpad pinch; −, + and Fit, at the bottom right of the map, do the same. When the map overflows, move around with the scrollbars.
• On the folded map, Front and Back, above the map, choose the side to edit.

An automatic block rearranges itself when the size, the orientation or the trails change. As soon as you move or resize it, it's placed by hand: a gold pin marks it in the list. Click the pin to make it automatic again, or Reset all for every block at once.

The chosen block's inspector also sets its appearance: a background (none, panel, map color or a custom color), its opacity, rounded corners and the border.

Text blocks

A text block holds your rules, your opening hours or a welcome note:

• paragraphs in Kicker, Title, Body or Small, in bold, italic or color, and bulleted lists;
• up to four images;
• pictogram lines, allowed or forbidden, such as “Dogs on a leash” or “No fires”;
• an arrow that points to a spot on the map, for example “Heated lodge”. Its tip stays on the same spot when the framing changes.

Download and publish

The Save button stores the map, and Sentinel redoes its PDF right away. Next to Download PDF, a note says where it stands: unsaved changes, update in progress, or the date of the last update. If the update fails, Retry starts it again. Download PDF first saves pending changes, then gives the PDF of what you see on screen.

To share the map without a file, open the Public link section:

The link only exists once the map is saved. If the map contains private trails, Sentinel first asks Publish private trails?: anyone with the link will see them. Turning the link off makes it stop working.

An always up-to-date map

When a trail, a difficulty or a point of interest changes, every map of the place redoes itself a few minutes later, published or not. Publishing or removing trail conditions redoes them too. The list's Generated column says when. The PDF to download and the public link always give the latest version: only the copies already printed need replacing.

Several maps

The Duplicate button, at the top of the editor or in the list's … menu, creates a copy with the same settings and the same trails, named “… (copy)”, without a public link. It's the shortest way to make the dark version of a poster, or a sector map from the general map.

Who can do what

The Printable maps permission is set in roles:

• View: see the maps and download their PDF.
• Edit: create, lay out, publish and delete the maps.

It also requires being able to at least view the trails. By default, only administrators have Edit. When the place's plan doesn't include printable maps, the entry carries a padlock and the page presents the plan that offers them.