OFM and Basecamp woes

[silverfox]

Last autumn I downloaded tiles from OFMlite to use on Basecamp while planning my forthcoming cycling tour.  It was a nice map, clear and visible and all went well with drawing routes.  Then the laptop went kaput and the maps were lost though the routes were backed up.  I decided not to download OFM to my new computer partly because my plans have changed and I would have to have the whole of Belgium and Holland on the computer, which is a lot of space to take up,  and partly because I don't like the idea of OFM getting into the registry.

So I downloaded the whole of Europe in three maps onto an sd card.  As I understand the instructions on OFM, downloading maps to sd card should give you maps which are usable on both Basecamp and a gps unit.  However, while they look great on the gps unit, and will be fine for when I do the trip, they are hard to use on Basecamp because the place names are very small and hard to read.

Am I missing something here?  Have I got a setting wrong in Basecamp which is making the place names so hard to read, or do I have to have two sets of OFM maps, one on sd card for the gps unit and one downloaded to the computer for use on Basecamp?

Or shall I just give up the struggle and buy a copy of Garmin City Navigator?  Does that look equally usable on the unit and on Basecamp?

[stu1102]

I use Basecamp to view maps on my Etrex however I differ from you by also having OFM on my computer as well notwithstanding this....

have you tried whilst your in Basecamp change the detail level that you can view

View,>>> Toolbars, >>>Map Products &>>> Detail Level. then click on highest/medium (whatever detail you need) like so below:

[fuaran]

I'm not sure what maps you are using? What website did you download them from, and what file did you install?

Though I think the best option is to download some maps designed for using in BaseCamp, and install them on your computer. This means you can use the maps when you don't have the GPS plugged in. Plus viewing the maps in BaseCamp is much faster, as it doesn't have to read them from the GPS.
There is no problem with installing the maps in BaseCamp on your PC. Yes, it does have to add a registry entry, but this doesn't affect anything else. And it has an uninstall program which will completely remove this if you want rid of it.
And it does need some hard drive space, but this should not be an issue on any modern PC. Its only a few hundred megabytes for all of Benelux.

Or if you want a smaller map, you can use this website and just select the area you want, it has an option for Openfietsmap Lite, with a BaseCamp installer: http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/

[silverfox]

Thanks for the help. I can see there's nothing to be lost by downloading OFM to my PC,  so I have now downloaded OFM for Benelux.  I expected the installed map to be clearer than reading the same map on sd card, but no, the place names are still really tiny and hard to make out, the street names when zoomed in on towns are equally difficult to read.  Certainly nothing like as clear as on the screenshots on the OFM website.

I have tried changing the detail level and that hasn't improved it.

I am using OFM Benelux in PC version.  Have I got something wrong in Basecamp, is there a font size setting somewhere that I need to be changing?  Any suggestions?

Thanks

[paulk]

There is a fontsetting in Basecamp.
Edit->Options->Display->Map Font->Select. Here you can change the size.

[Feanor]

I don't think that's user-adjustable on the device.
It is in mapsource, as described above.

It's my understanding that the rendering is controlled by a TYP file, which is contained within the mapset.
It's down to the people who built the garmin mapset from the OSM database to configure this.

There are tools available to build and edit mapsets, but I've not used any of them.

[silverfox]

Eureka!  Thank you Paulk,  I have zapped up the font size and put everything in bold and taken the level of detail down a bit and now have what I consider to be a perfect, clear map.  Others might not agree but it does the job for me.  Thanks everyone.