Everyone who finishes something long has the GPX file. It sits in Strava or Komoot and gets looked at twice. Printed on the ground it actually crossed, it becomes an object somebody keeps.
This is, in my experience, the single best thing you can make with a map printer — and a far better gift than a mountain the recipient has never stood on.
The frame follows the route, not the view
Import the GPX first, then size the frame around it. A route is almost always long and thin, so a square frame wastes most of the plate on ground nobody walked.
Two fixes, and they combine. Rotate the frame to lie along the route — a Lake District ridge walk running southwest to northeast wants a frame turned about 45 degrees, not one pointing at the pole. And use a rectangle rather than a square when the route is genuinely linear.
Exaggerate more than you think
This is where route prints differ from terrain prints. A day's walk covers 15 to 30 km, and at that width relief collapses:
| Route | Frame | Range | At 1×, 150 mm | Try |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Everest Base Camp trek | 30 km | ~3,000 m | 15 mm | 2× |
| A Lakeland horseshoe | 12 km | ~900 m | 11 mm | 3× |
| A road century | 60 km | ~400 m | 1 mm | 10× |
Do not feel bad about it. On a terrain print the mountain is the subject and honesty about its shape matters. On a route print the line is the subject and the ground is context — you are exaggerating the backdrop so the story reads.
Make the track substantial
A GPS trace is a hairline. Printed at true width it would be invisible and would not survive being handled, so it gets raised as a ribbon standing off the ground.
Sensible starting points: 1.4 mm wide and 1.2 mm proud of the surface. Wider if the plate is big or if you want it to read from a distance. If you are printing in one colour, go a little taller rather than wider — height catches shadow, and shadow is what makes it visible on a monochrome print.
Add just enough context
The temptation is to switch everything on. Resist it: a busy plate buries the line. What genuinely helps is water inlaid (lakes and rivers orient people instantly), contour lines at a coarse interval, and nothing else. Leave the buildings and the roads off unless the route is urban.
If the route is a race or a well-known trail, put the name and distance along the front edge of the base. It turns a nice object into something with a caption.
Printing it
The track is the only fragile part. Everything else is a heightfield and needs no thought.
- Cooling on full for the track ribbon, which is a thin tall wall.
- 0.16 mm layers, and a 1.2 mm ribbon is then about eight layers tall — enough to swap colour cleanly partway up if you want a two-tone finish.
- Two colours without a tool changer: print everything, insert a colour change at the layer where the track starts, and swap to red. It works because the track sits at a consistent height above the ground.
- Base 4–5 mm. These plates tend to be wide, and wide plates curl.
Doing it
Open the map maker, import your GPX, and the route draws on the map before anything is built, so you can position the frame around what you can see. Then set the exaggeration, switch water on, and export.
Best results come from routes with a shape: a horseshoe, an out-and-back up a valley, a summit day. A commute is a squiggle. A climb is a story.