Map To Poster – Create Art of your favourite city • Hacker News Board

Re: Map To Poster – Create Art of your favourite city

#41

Post by jlarocco » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 4:26 PM UTC

Helmut10001 wrote: post #30

San Francisco looks nice, but there seems to be a problem with the projection in some of the sample images. It looks as if it isn't UTM but a global sphere projection, which isn't suitable for local renders. It's suspicious that the word 'projection' isn't mentioned in the Readme.

It looks like the final images have some kind of vignetting to make the corners and outter edges fade away. Probably grabbing OSM tiles and doing some image processing.

Looks neat!

Re: Map To Poster – Create Art of your favourite city

#42

Post by thamer » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 4:27 PM UTC

arnavpraneet wrote: post #28

what are the blue dots? (not water bodies i think?)

Yes, the blue and orange dots are from the water and parks Nodes and Ways in the OSM data.

It doesn't look like the orange and blue colors are part of the theme definitions, so the rendering library may be using some default values. This is why they are rendered in the same color on images using different theme files.

Re: Map To Poster – Create Art of your favourite city

#43

Post by jfengel » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 4:52 PM UTC

nycerrrrrrrrrr wrote: post #32

Does anyone have recommendations for how to actually print a poster from images like these?

For what it's worth, I use Vistaprint. That's not based on an extensive comparison, just that it always works for me and seems comparable in price and quality to other services.

Re: Map To Poster – Create Art of your favourite city

#44

Post by japoneris » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 4:54 PM UTC

Looks amazing ! In my free time, i play with my laser cutting machine. It will save me some design time. Thanks

Re: Map To Poster – Create Art of your favourite city

#45

Post by dylan604 » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 5:15 PM UTC

What happens if there are multiple cities with the same name. Maybe this is a US specific problem, but there are many states with cities of the same name from another state. As a few examples:

Salem, OR and Salem, MA

Portland, OR and Portland, ME

Springfield, IL and Springfield, MO

Dallas, TX and Dallas, GA

Re: Map To Poster – Create Art of your favourite city

#46

Post by Footprint0521 » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 5:20 PM UTC

mft_ wrote: post #10

I believe (from a quick code check on my phone) it should be possible to output the images to SVG with a little tweak, thanks to your use of matplotlib? Is there a reason you’ve defaulted to PNG that I’m missing?

Holy heck exporting to PDF/SVG for large cities is laggy, just patched the repo and did it for one over half a million people and it’s insanely slow lol

Re: Map To Poster – Create Art of your favourite city

#47

Post by MengerSponge » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 5:28 PM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #45

What happens if there are multiple cities with the same name. Maybe this is a US specific problem, but there are many states with cities of the same name from another state. As a few examples: Salem, OR and Salem, MA Portland, OR and Portland, ME Springfield, IL and Springfield, MO Dallas, TX and Dallas, GA

Don't even get started on American cities named after world cities: Paris, Munster, London, Toledo, Memphis, Athens,...

Re: Map To Poster – Create Art of your favourite city

#48

Post by originalankur » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 5:31 PM UTC

Footprint0521 wrote: post #46

mft_ wrote: post #10

I believe (from a quick code check on my phone) it should be possible to output the images to SVG with a little tweak, thanks to your use of matplotlib? Is there a reason you’ve defaulted to PNG that I’m missing?

Holy heck exporting to PDF/SVG for large cities is laggy, just patched the repo and did it for one over half a million people and it’s insanely slow lol

There is throttling in the code when making api request to respect the map provider as per their terms and conditions. Can make few thing parallel but it's a hobby project how many posters would one person want to generate?.

Re: Map To Poster – Create Art of your favourite city

#49

Post by originalankur » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 5:32 PM UTC

Kwpolska wrote: post #26

Pretty cool! It would be great if there was a way to set coordinates manually, since Nominatim can sometimes produce mediocre results. Also, would be nice to have a way to render the same map in all themes, not just one.

The initial version were coordinates actually but then realised people mostly love their cities more than anything and it's easy that way. Will add this feature back as optional parameters.

Re: Map To Poster – Create Art of your favourite city

#50

Post by originalankur » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 5:33 PM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #45

What happens if there are multiple cities with the same name. Maybe this is a US specific problem, but there are many states with cities of the same name from another state. As a few examples: Salem, OR and Salem, MA Portland, OR and Portland, ME Springfield, IL and Springfield, MO Dallas, TX and Dallas, GA

lol, I didn't even think of it. May be I should start taking country too. Edge case :-p