Don't know about anyone else but I've gotten into the process of taking the high resolution on line supliment maps and expanding them in a graphics program so that the squares are 1" then printing these off for use in the game. When done in color they look great. Put a couple on minis down and your ready to go.
My only problem with them is this. Paizo is kind enough to provide two maps, one with room numbers, traps and secret doors for the DM, but the stipped down map simply removes these items... its doesn't fill them in. This is mostly prevalent in secret doors.
I end up cutting and pasting from other parts of the map to clean this up and to be honest it always look off. Its becoming easy for my players to pick up on this and try though they might, metagaming pops in.
Does anyone else use these maps this way? Wouldn't it be nice if the secondary maps took this into consideration?
Shade 325
yeah, i understand where you're coming from - but there's at least one problem from the paizo end that i can see from here, which means there's probably several others.
i'm assuming the maps paizo gets from the artists are un-numberd and un-labeled, and that they are adding in the correct symbols where needed when doing the layout/edition on the magazine. having maps without the secret areas on them would mean commissioning and purchasing an entirely new peice of art! for a free online supplement, that seems to be a bit much to ask...
of course i could be entirely wrong here.
I use the high-res maps from the PDF, converted to 50px squares, in Fantasy Grounds, as my Age of Worms campaign is played over the internet :)
It's very interesting to note how the "full" maps are created. If you use the "selection" tool in the PDF, you'll notice that most of the components on the "DM" map (Room numbers, secret doors, etc) are true "text" overlayed on the map images directly in the PDF. They aren't part of the actual image!
Also, you may have noticed that most of the maps are made up of multiple images. This is normally fine, but sometimes the images themselves are too small or don't line up exactly, but have been stretched in the PDF to make them line up properly. This causes me no end of hastle, as I have to try and dupelicate the same stretch-n-align operation in Photoshop to reconstruct the maps. Sometimes it's so severe that I have to give up, and just take a screenshot of the PDF map, and then resize that in Photoshop to be a proper scale for use as a battlemat. Kind of defeats the purpose of grabbing the high-res version of the PDF. There have only been a few maps that exhibited this annoying problem. I think "Sodden Hold" was one of them, but I may be mis-remembering.
Anyway, yes, it would be very nice if I didn't have to go in and cover up secret areas and other "DM only" items that sometimes sneak into the player version of the maps.