Print this map

Print or PDF-export a map directly from its editor without first building a custom web app wrapper.

basic

The map editor has a Print button in the toolbar. Click it to land in the print layout designer with the calling map already wired up.

What you can do from the Print chooser

When you click the Print button, you see two options:

  • Create a new print layout pre-bound to this map. Opens the print layout designer with this map already pointing at the Map, Legend, Scalebar, and North arrow elements. You start with a blank Letter portrait canvas and drag elements onto it.
  • Use an existing layout. Lists every print layout you can read in the portal. Clicking one opens the layout's designer with this map wired in so you can adjust if needed and then print.

Why the entry point matters

Print layouts have been part of GratisGIS for a while, but they lived inside the custom web app builder — you had to build an app to print a map. The Print button on the map editor closes that gap so an author can print directly from any map they're working on.

How smart binding works

Every print layout has elements that need to know which map to render: the Map frame itself, the Legend, the Scale bar, the North arrow. When you open the designer from a map's Print button, those elements auto-bind to the calling map. You don't have to click each one and pick a map from a dropdown.

If you save the layout and use it later from a different map, the same auto-binding rule applies: whichever map you're on when you open the Print chooser is the one the elements wire up to. The layout remembers its original map only as a default for preview in the designer.

What's coming next

  • Server-side render (Phase 2) will replace the browser's current window.print() path with a Puppeteer-based renderer that produces vector-fidelity PDFs (text stays text, lines stay vector). Layouts and the designer don't change; the output quality does.
  • Drawings on print (Phase 3) will let you include the redline / markup overlay on a map in the print output, honoring per-set visibility toggles.
  • <a href="items-print-template">Print template item</a> for the designer and the element vocabulary.