Bombay Bicycle ClubBase Maps
Ride leaders and ride inventors: No more fifth generation photocopies!
As many of you know, Bicycle Federation of WI sells a printed set of five bike route maps. What many of you may not know is that single counties are available online in PDF format at http://www.dot.state.wi.us/travel/bike-foot/countymaps.htm.
Using this resource, we’ve assembled a series of four-county base maps suitable for mapping Bombay rides and added some streets where important. Just click on and download the PDF(s) you need! About 1 MB each. If you have any trouble opening the PDFs in your browser, RIGHT click and “save target as” and then open the files from your desktop.
- NW - Dane, Columbia, Iowa, Sauk (~10 MB)
- SW - Dane, Iowa, Green, Lafayette (~1 MB)
- SE - Dane, Jefferson, Green, Rock (~1 MB)
As you download the files (mostly over 1 MB), save them on your hard drive. Now, you can use any map as an onscreen reference or print portions of it.
To view and print sections, using your free Adobe reader:
- Left click on the zoom tool, and then hold while you draw a box around the area you want to zoom in on.
- Left click on the graphics select tool, hold to draw a box around the area you want to print, and print to letter or legal-sized paper.
- Draw your ride map by hand. Use a black sharpie for good black & white copies.
To get a finished hand-drawn map back into electronic form, scan it.
For those with the full version of Acrobat:
- Use the crop tool to select an area, click the icon a second time to crop, and then save as newname.pdf.
- Use the pencil and line tools to draw a route. A black 2-point line seems to work the best. You can format lines to have tails for the directional arrows. Dotted lines (say for short and medium routes on a ride) are difficult, but you can use the pencil tool. Or, go ahead and use some odd color not appearing on the map, and then draw in by hand for black & white copies.
- You can print your creation, get copies made, email it, post it on your website, send it to the BBC touring committee and so on.
You can work with the PDFs in Pagemaker, for example to draw in additional street detail and add text. Just place the file, make changes and then when done print to Acrobat distiller to make a new PDF. Or use Photoshop to manipulate and make new PDFs, although the resulting files will be larger.
Cue Sheets:Excel is a great tool for making cue sheets. If you have the full version of Acrobat, you can insert one or more pages into a PDF of a map you’ve already created. They can be Excel docs, or Word docs.