Baselayer Development

Josh J Norman
Caltopo is the best mapping software available (for both desktop and mobile), especially with many of the updates in the last few years. Thank you for all the work building this great resource. I have 2 requests for baselayer development: 1) More baselayers, less US-centric. Non-US scanned topos are available on other common mapping software that are not available on Caltopo. Also, several simple version of MapBuilder would be great- for example, one version where the contour lines are always in metric and one that is always in feet. 2) A smoother and more readable MapBuilder in general. Currently different zoom levels are so different from each other that going back and forth is jarring. In the more zoomed-out views, labels and lines (trails, roads, boundaries) clutter the field, and too much contour detail / sense of depth is lost. In the more zoomed-in views, contour lines and sense of depth is good in places with steep topography, but poor in less dramatic areas. To quickly get a sense of this, try using MapBuilder in Europe, from the global zoom level down to the local. It's kind of messy and jarring. Then try the same thing on Gaia's baselayer (just for reference-- Caltopo in general is a much better resource). Sorry for the long post-- #2 is more of a general than a specific feature request. Just something I'm hoping the team might be willing to work into their dev decision over time. Thank you for reading!
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    Matt Jacobs

    Hi Josh -

    On the first point, we're always open to new datasets that users can point us at.  Ideally they are free / public domain; paid licensing isn't necessarily a dealbreaker, but most agencies that license their map layers want to do so on a per-user or per-usage basis, which we're not currently set up to track.

    As to multiple MapBuilder visualizations, I wish I could turn back time and start there instead of having the current mixed feet/meters approach, but transitioning to multiple layers is tricky if we want users' existing offline downloads to continue functioning and not leave them stranded - particularly when dealing with shared maps, where the default layer might be visually indistinguishable from the layer the user has downloaded, but not actually visible offline.

    Agreed that MapBuilder styling could benefit from another pass; there are always tradeoffs involved in what data to show at which level and we've opted for a very data-intensive approach which admittedly has the downside of being harder to read at times.  There are also some styling decisions which don't translate as well to, say, places that generally have longer names, or places where OSM has been mapped to a different level of detail with regard to things like gates.

    - Matt

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