--- title: "Maps Maps Maps: Part 2" layout: post excerpt: | In which I make my first laser etched map! image: /assets/blog/maps/after_sanding.jpeg thumbnail: /assets/blog/maps/after_sanding_thumbnail.jpeg alt: A photograph at an angle of a laser etched map on some plywood. The Thames is quite visible as a thick black line in the bottom right. --- A last minute leaving gift idea for a friend inspired me to finish my first actual laser cut map. I used leaflet.js to overlay the names of some places we had visited together in London onto those nice Stamen Design map tiles from before. You can see the digital version [here](/projects/tonis-map/).

This is what it looks like straight off the laser cutter. The contrast is super washed out because the smoke from the cutting process darkens all the surrounding wood.

I had a bunch of issues with getting that to work mostly based around the fact that these tiles are raster images that are intended for streaming to a zoomable and panable viewer on a screen. The design tradeoff of the maps don't quite make as much sense when you start transfering them to a static image. I did some hacks to use the tiles intended for a higher zoom level but you can only take that so far before the text starts getting unreadable.

To deal with the darkending from the smoke I sand the whole thing back with 80 grit sandpaper on an orbital sander. I did break a few small features off here and there but it's ok!

I think there is a better approach that involves getting raw OpenStreetMap data and rendering it directly using something like [QGIS and some kind of map style files](https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/186808/how-to-create-high-quality-map-with-qgis-and-stamen-tiles) but that seems like a whole new deep rabbit hole I'm not ready to fall into just yet.