Maps in your book

Any map in your story wiki can go in the book, before chapter one as in many fantasy books, or at the back. It is a Map page of the book's front or back matter. The map stays where it is in the wiki: the page only names it, so a change to the map is in the next export.

Add a map to the book

On the book's page, the Front and back matter card has a Map button on each side. It adds a page and opens it. Under The map:

• Map from the story wiki lists every map with a picture, by category. A map with levels (cellars, floors) has a Level choice too; the main level is used unless you choose another.
• How it is set: Full page makes the map as large as the page allows, with the caption small and in italics under it, and the page's heading is not printed. With its heading and caption prints the heading above the map and the caption under it as ordinary text, and fits the map to the room that is left.
• Print in black and white: see below.

The map shows on the page as it will go in, with the words a reader who cannot see it will get. The page's text, under its heading, is the caption. It can be empty. Add as many Map pages as you like.

The page is a Markdown file like the other matter pages. The choices are lines at the top of it:

---
map: maps/the-known-lands
level: cellars
fit: with caption
print: black and white
---
# The Known Lands

Drawn from the harbour master's charts.

If you rename the map's page or move it to another category, the Map page follows it. If the map's page is deleted, the book's list says Map missing and the page says so. Until you choose the map again, that page is left out of every export, and the export says so; the rest of the book is made as usual.

In print

In the print interior each map is on a page of its own, inside the margins of the trim size you chose, with its caption.

• A picture (PNG, JPEG, GIF or WebP) is printed at the size it has on the page. Printers ask for 300 DPI (dots per inch) at that size. Before you download, the Export dialog warns about a map that falls short and says how many pixels it needs. For a full page in a 5.5 × 8.5 inch book that is about 1,300 pixels across; a larger trim needs more.
• An SVG map is printed as sharp lines when its words are in EB Garamond, the font of the print interior: it stays sharp at any size and needs no DPI check. Its words in any other font would be lost on the way into the PDF, so such a map is printed as a 300 DPI picture made in your browser, with its words as your browser draws them, which is what printers ask for. Maps made by a generator in Rescriptus, and drawn maps in colour, have their own fonts, so they print this way. A drawn map in the Black and white style, or printed in black and white, has its words in EB Garamond and prints as sharp lines. The export's report says when a map is printed as a picture.

Print in black and white. Most printed books are black and white inside, and colour pages cost much more. A colour map printed in black and white turns colours into greys that can be hard to tell apart, so this choice does it for you with care: a picture is made grey with stronger contrast, and an SVG map has its lines and words printed in black and its areas in greys of their own lightness. A map drawn in Rescriptus is drawn again in its Black and white style instead: pure black lines, with water lines, hatching and dots in place of colours (the preview on the Map page only shows it grey). It only changes the print interior: the EPUB and the website keep the colours. Check the result in the PDF before you upload it.

In the EPUB

The publishing edition of the EPUB holds each map as a picture on its own page, where the Map page sits, with its caption. A PNG, JPEG or GIF goes in as it is when it is a sensible size; an SVG, a WebP or a very large picture is drawn as a PNG, 2,400 pixels on its longer side for an SVG, so it can be zoomed into on a phone. Every picture stays under 5 MB, the limit Kindle is reported to have for one picture. Each map is in the book's contents, so a reader can find it again.

Each map has alt text, the words a screen reader says instead of showing it: the map's name (and its level), the Summary from the map's page, and the places its pins open, up to twelve.

On the website

The website shows each map on its page, above its caption, with the same alt text: an SVG as itself, so it stays sharp, and any other picture as it is.

Not in the other files

The Word manuscript, the reading-copy and manuscript PDFs, Markdown, plain text, the ordinary EPUB and the reader copy have no front or back matter, so they have no maps either. The Export dialog says so when the book has Map pages.

Pins are never printed: the book is not an index of the wiki.