How to print an antique map at home
Start with the size, not with the paper
Everything about printing an old map is decided by one number: how wide the sheet will be on your wall. Choose it first. The paper, the printer and the frame all follow from it, and choosing them in the other order is how people end up with a beautiful file and a print they do not hang.
Stand in front of the wall and measure the space you actually have. Then subtract the frame. A moulding two centimetres wide takes four centimetres off the width, and a mount border takes considerably more — eight centimetres a side is common for a large print. The image itself is always smaller than the hole in the wall you were imagining.
Two numbers, not one
Every map on this site states two print sizes, and they mean different things.
- The map — the engraved image inside its border. This is the number to use when you know exactly how wide the picture should be.
- The full sheet with margins — the whole leaf as it was printed, including the blank paper around the plate, the imprint line and whatever the engraver put outside the border.
Across the maps published here the sheet runs on average about seven centimetres wider than the map, and on one of them the difference is thirty-seven centimetres. If you buy by a single advertised number you will not know which of the two you are getting. That is why both are printed on every product page and in every restoration passport.
What arrives when you download
Each map is six separate downloads, and you take only the one your frame needs:
- the full sheet with its margins;
- the sheet trimmed to the plate border;
- four crops — 3:2, 4:3, 5:4 and ISO A.
Each download is a ZIP holding one JPEG at 300 dpi in sRGB, the restoration passport as a PDF, and a short read-me. The crops exist so that you never have to crop a historical sheet yourself and guess where to cut; each one is cut to a standard frame proportion with the composition kept.
If your frame is a standard photo size, take the matching crop. If your frame is custom, or you plan to have a mount cut to the image, take the trimmed sheet. Take the full sheet when you want the paper, the plate mark and the imprint line to be part of the picture — which, on an old map, is often the better choice.
Printing it at home
A desktop printer will take you to A4 or A3, and a few A3+ models reach 329 × 483 mm. That is enough for the smaller sheets and for a test, and it is not enough for most of these maps, which were printed as large folio leaves and stay large at 300 dpi.
Two things matter more than the printer model. The first is that you print at 100 % and switch off every “fit to page”, “scale to fit” and “shrink oversized pages” option: those quietly resample the file and soften the engraved line. The second is that you let the printer driver manage colour and you do not sharpen the file yourself — the line is already as sharp as the plate printed it, and sharpening an engraving produces a white halo along every stroke.
A test worth doing
Before you commit to a large print, print one A4 window from the middle of the file at 100 %, with no scaling. It costs one sheet and it tells you three things at once: whether the tone is what you expected on your paper, whether your printer is dropping the finest lines, and whether the size you chose really gives you legible place names.
Printing it at a shop
For anything above A3 a print shop or an online lab is the sensible route, and it is usually cheaper than it sounds. Send the file as it is. Ask for no scaling, no sharpening and no “auto enhance”; ask that the file is printed at its native size. If the shop asks for a colour profile, the file is sRGB.
Large format printers are normally roll-fed, so the width of the roll, not the length, is your limit — a map ninety centimetres on the long side is an ordinary job.
Paper
An engraving printed on glossy photo paper looks like a photograph of an engraving. What you want is a matte or lightly textured stock, warm rather than bright white, so that the paper of the print stands in for the paper of the original.
| Stock | What it does to an old map |
|---|---|
| Matte fine art, 200–310 gsm | The usual right answer. Holds the engraved line, keeps the hand colour quiet, takes a frame well. |
| Cotton rag, textured | Closest to the feel of a period sheet; the texture eats the very finest hatching, so it suits large prints better than small ones. |
| Uncoated / cartridge | Fine for a test or a pinned-up print. Ink sits flatter and colours go a shade duller. |
| Glossy or satin photo | Not recommended. The sheen reads as modern and the reflections fight the frame glass. |
Bright white papers with optical brighteners make the warm paper tone of a 17th-century sheet look dirty rather than old. A natural or slightly cream white is kinder to it.
Margins and framing
If you print the full sheet, the historical margin is already in the file and you do not need to add much: a centimetre of white around it is enough to give the framer something to hold. If you print the trimmed sheet, add your own margin — two to four centimetres, or let the mount do it.
A mount does two useful things: it lifts the glass off the print, and it gives the eye a rest between the engraving and the frame. For a large map, a wider bottom border than top is the traditional proportion and still looks right.
Glass or acrylic with UV protection is worth the difference if the print will hang in daylight. Hand colour on the originals has survived three centuries in a book; on your wall it is the modern ink that fades first.
Before you spend money on a large print
- Measure the wall, then subtract the frame and the mount.
- Decide whether you are hanging the map or the sheet, and use the matching number from the product page.
- Download the crop that fits your frame instead of cropping yourself.
- Print one A4 window at 100 % as a test.
- Tell the shop: native size, no scaling, no sharpening, sRGB.
Why the file is a JPEG
Because a 300 dpi JPEG in sRGB is what every print shop, every online lab and every home printer accepts without a conversation, and because at the quality these files are written at the difference is not something a print reveals. The restoration passport that travels in the same ZIP states the measurements, the archive, the shelfmark and the year, and says plainly what was left alone.
Read next
- Where to print your map — print shops near you and checked prices online.
- What 300 dpi actually gives you — what the number means once the map is on the wall.
- How it works — what is in the download, how large it prints and what the licence allows.