[GRASS-user] how to speed of map generation with ps.map?

[Dylan Beaudette]

On Tuesday 29 July 2008, Tim Michelsen wrote:
> Hello,
> for my current project I would like to create some postscript maps.
>
> When I run ps.map it takes a lot of time. I use a DEM as raster layer
> and country borders as vector layer on top of it.
> The DEM covers two SRTM tiles.
>
> Is there any way to speed the process up?
> How do I best set the resolution to get a nice looking map but also save
> file size and processing time?
>
> Thanks for your help in advance.
>
> Regards,
> Timmie
>
might be a good time to investigate the concept of a minmum mapping unit size, 
or the minimum discernible feature size. some simple ratios come to mind:

1. width of region in meters / width of paper map in cm 
10 km width of region / 100 mm of figure == 10 m/mm of figure

2. (cells / m in region) * m / mm in figure
1 meter resolution (1 cell / m) * 10 m/mm in figure == 10 cells / mm.
10 meter resolution (1 cell / 10 m) * 10 m/mm in figure == 1 cell / mm.

... or work with page sizes, points, and DPI ...

It just depends on how much detail you need in the map, and how much detail 
your printer can put down on paper. 600 DPI is approximately 23 dots per mm.

Cheers,

-- 
Dylan Beaudette
Soil Resource Laboratory
http://casoilresource.lawr.ucdavis.edu/
University of California at Davis
530.754.7341