Commercial firms using offset litho printers to do most of the printing of orienteering maps. Charges vary between firms, but 1000 maps at A4 size cost about £300, increasing to £350 for the A3 size. This gives a map cost of 30p and 35p respectively. Adding these figures to those for the survey gives an overall cost of 35 - 50p. I am sure most will agree this is good value for an important part of our sport. However I believe that with planning and the careful use of the technology of OCAD cartography, opportunities now exist to further reduce print costs.
Firstly I should mention laser printing for small print runs. I understand that commercial firms charge about 50p for A4 and £1.00 for A3 prints. This makes laser printing relatively expensive compared with the cost of offset litho, unless one has access to a non-commercial laser printing outlet. However the use of laser printing is developing rapidly and costs will reduce to offset price levels in the not too distant future. Laser printing has obvious advantages and the printing of O maps by this method is to be discussed at a BOF conference later this year.
In the good old days maps were laboriously drawn using pen and ink and the need to make changes at times could be horrendous. Using OCAD this task has now become user friendly. By careful layout planning and moving around using OCAD, A3 size maps can be reduced down to A4 size to make them more manageable and to save on print costs.
Through OCAD it is possible to import two maps into a single .ocd file. This enables the printing of either two different maps or two copies of the same map in one print run. Using A3 paper, two A4 maps printed together bring the cost of an A4 map down from 30p to just over 17p. This effectively halves the cost of A4 map printing. Without going into further detail, similar savings for A3 maps are possible because most commercial printers can now handle A2 paper sizes.
However to use combination printing of two different maps necessitates the use of a common format in the way symbols, the colour table and initial map setup are prepared. From sources such as the BOF Map Group publication mapN&V and the regular exchange of information between cartographers, sound OCAD principles have long been established but never written down in a booklet. The BOF Map Group has for some time been intending to produce listed tips on good OCAD practice, but to date this has failed to materialise. The only publication BOF currently issues is 'Mapmaking for Orienteers' which has only a small section on computer cartography. First produced in 1991, this publication is long overdue for revision.
A cartographer needs above all to learn from experience and by talking to other mappers. It is my intention in later editions of Points East to outline some of the methods of OCAD computer cartography that I have learnt over the many years I have worked on orienteering maps.
Peter Leverington (NOR)