How does one use the power and cost of DTP equipment to make mapboards?

The mapboards are the toughest, primarily because of their size and because of bugs in the DTP software. For the best output quality, I recommend sending drawing commands (lines, circles, etc.) directly to the printer instead of bitmap images. I was not happy with the DTP tools Out There, so ended up writing my own program in Visual Basic to handle this task.

I've been using an Epson Stylus Color 800 inkjet. One drawback is that this model cannot handle 11x17 paper, so I'm now thinking of upgrading to a printer that can. The output quality is good, but the speed is far slower for bitmap images (~10 times slower) than the advertisements indicate. It's fairly tolerant of paper type; I've been using 80lb cover stock no problem. There are a couple of annoying bugs in Epson's printer driver. I was able to reproduce one with just a few lines of VB programming, and reported it to Epson, but they had zero interest in seeing my program and fixing the bug. At least I was able to find a human at Epson to discuss this with; the other major printer manufacturer, HP, has automated its support lines, making it virtually impossible to find a human there.

My maps combine a bitmap with drawing commands. The sole purpose of the bitmap is to provide a colorful background. Everything else (lines, circles, text) is drawn by sending the appropriate commands directly to the printer.

Lining up the drawing commands with the bitmap was a bit challenging, mostly because my program allows scaling to any size. That is, the program automatically spreads a large map printout across multiple paper pages; you simply specify the number of pages wide and high you want.