Field guide

Map journeys, not just lines.

Mapper combines real travel geography with a conceptual trail sketchbook. Both modes use the same portable project and export workflow.

Travel maps

Use geographic stops and travel legs over OpenFreeMap, or choose Symbolic travel for an automatically arranged, not-to-scale itinerary with no basemap. Solid lines work well for road and rail travel; dashed curves distinguish flights and walking transfers.

Trail sketches

Switch to Trail sketch for an abstract plane. The winding, noise scale, octaves, warp, modulation, jitter, and smoothing settings produce deterministic Perlin routes through ordered waypoints.

Terrain

Travel contours and hillshade come from public Mapzen Terrain Tiles hosted in the AWS Open Data Registry. Trail contours are simulated from the project seed and elevation samples.

Projects and YAML

Mapper autosaves locally in IndexedDB. Save a portable .mapper.yaml file, open one from disk, or use Builder to edit the validated versioned YAML directly.

Symbols

Choose an Apache-2.0 Carbon symbol or import SVG files. Place individual draggable symbols or create one seeded scatter rule limited to a project edge, explicit region, selected stop, travel leg, waypoint, or trail route. Separate line, text, and symbol scales tune hierarchy without changing project geometry.

Exports

Transparent SVG exports editable overlays without a background. Background SVG embeds the composed map. PNG captures the complete visible composition at double resolution.