CRAMBA Trails Outline Poster from OSM Data

Last updated on December 27, 2020

Finding myself a little bored, I put together a poster (11″ x 17″) showing outlines of the CRAMBA-supported trails on one overview. (Link)

This ended up being more popular than I expected, with a handful of people wanting to know how I did it, so I’ll detail the steps here:

1. Ensure that all the trail routes are in OpenStreetMap.
2. Using JOSM load each trail area one at a time and make an OSM XML file with just the data you want outlined:
   1. Select the ways which comprise the trail you want shown.
   2. Create a new data layer (Command-N).
   3. Make the original data layer active.
   4. Copy the selected data from the first layer to your new layer with Edit → Merge Selection (Shift-Command-M).
   5. Hide the original data layer.
   6. Review the new layer to be sure it has everything you want.
   7. Select all nodes and ways (Command-A) and remove all tags to make later processing easier.
   8. Look good? Is everything you want in the new layer? Save it to a .osm file and do the next trail.
3. Once you have an OSM file for each trail, convert them to Adobe Illustrator format using this version of osm2ai.pl.
   1. Get osm2ai.pl working on your computer. I run this on macOS, and it works fine on Linux as well. Since it’s a Perl script there are probably some dependencies; likely resolved by installing a few modules.
   2. Process each OSM file with: osm2ai.pl --input infilename.osm --projection mercator --output outfilename.ai
4. Open each file in Illustrator, combine them into a larger document, make it look the way you want, etc.
5. Done!