Have you tried printing a Flip-Mat PDF or an adventure's map at home? The map is far bigger than a sheet of paper, and printing it "to fit" shrinks the squares until your miniatures no longer fit them.
Mapsmith is a Mac app that prints battle maps at true scale, one grid square per inch, on ordinary printer paper. It finds the map's grid, splits the map into pages that fit your printer's printable area at exactly one inch per square, and prints them, ready to trim and tape together.
It is free and open source, and it works with any PDF or image you open; it contains no maps of its own.
Print any Paizo map you own, on demand. With Scrollkeeper installed, press ⇧⌘O, type a few letters of the map's name and press Return. Every Flip-Mat, Flip-Tiles set, Map Pack and Poster Map you own in your paizo.com library is there, whether or not you have ever downloaded it. Scrollkeeper fetches the map from Paizo if needed, and it opens in Mapsmith ready to print at true scale. No digging through your downloads folder, no hunting for the right zip on paizo.com. Saw a Flip-Mat in an adventure five minutes before the session? It's on the table before your players finish their snacks.
Paizo's map of the Inner Sea with a square grid drawn over it, detected at 100 pixels per square and split into four A4 pages at one inch per square (see Sample map).
- Open a PDF or any image (⌘O, drag it onto the window, or Open With in Finder). For a PDF, every large image in the document is shown as a thumbnail. Each file opens in its own window, and File › Open Recent lists the latest ones. Images dragged straight out of another app, such as a map from Pluck, can be dropped too.
- Open from Scrollkeeper (⇧⌘O): type part of a map's name to search the Flip-Mats, Flip-Tiles and other maps you own on paizo.com, as listed by Scrollkeeper (1.4 or later), which stays in the background. A cloud marks the maps not downloaded yet: click it to download one, or press Return to download and open it in one go, and watch the download's progress. For a map pack Scrollkeeper sends the PDF, which has twice the resolution of the pack's JPGs. Mapsmith never signs in to Paizo itself; Scrollkeeper does the downloading.
- Select a map: its grid is detected and it is split into pages that fit the printable area of the current printer and paper (File › Page Setup…). Edge strips thinner than 1 in are trimmed rather than printed on their own pages, and the map is turned 90° when that uses fewer pages.
- Print the pages directly (⌘P), or Export them as a PDF (⌘E).
Print at 100% scale. Each page keeps the printer's non-printable margin blank; trim that border where pages meet.
Grid detection sums edge strength along every row and column of the map and finds the repeat distance by autocorrelation. If no grid is found, the app falls back to the PDF's own page scale or the image's DPI metadata, and you can always type the pixels per grid square yourself in the inspector.
macOS 15 or later.
Download the disk image from the releases page, open it and drag Mapsmith to Applications.
Releases are signed with the Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so macOS opens them like any other app. Older releases aren't, and macOS blocks them the first time:
- Open Mapsmith once. macOS says it cannot be opened; click Done.
- Open System Settings › Privacy & Security and scroll down to the message about Mapsmith.
- Click Open Anyway and confirm.
After that it opens normally.
Mapsmith is part of the Tableside Toolkit, free Mac apps for running Pathfinder and Starfinder games in person; Turnkeeper and Field Guide run on the iPad too. Like any good toolkit, each one grants a +1 item bonus to game prep.
- Scrollkeeper keeps your Paizo library in order and downloads your purchases.
- Pluck gets the art, text and stat blocks out of a PDF.
- Pawn Shop prints just the pawns you need, single-sided, from your pawn PDFs.
- Mapsmith prints battle maps at true scale on ordinary paper.
- Turnkeeper builds encounters and runs initiative at the table, with the battle card of whoever's turn it is, on the iPad and the Mac.
- Field Guide carries the Pathfinder and Starfinder compendium, offline, on the iPad and the Mac.
The app is free and always will be. If it saves you time and you would like to say thanks, you can leave a tip on Ko-fi. A donation is entirely optional and unlocks nothing.
make app # builds "build/Mapsmith.app"
make run # builds and launches the app
make install # builds the app and moves it to /Applications
make test # runs the unit tests
make lint # runs SwiftLint
make coverage # runs the tests and enforces the coverage threshold
make dmg # packages the app into a disk image
make icon # redraws Resources/AppIcon.icnsBuilding needs Xcode 16 or later (Swift 6 toolchain). scripts/sign-app.sh signs the app with the Developer ID when
the keychain holds a Developer ID Application certificate, and ad hoc otherwise. Open Package.swift in Xcode to
run and debug it.
Tests that read real maps use PDFs in TestData/, which is not committed because the maps are copyrighted.
Copy or link your own Flip-Mat PDFs there to run them; they are skipped when the folder is empty.
The code is in two parts: Sources/MapsmithCore holds all the logic and is unit tested (grid detection,
finding maps in PDFs, planning and exporting pages), and Sources/Mapsmith is the SwiftUI app.
| What | Where |
|---|---|
| Images dropped from other apps | ~/Library/Caches/io.github.scooper4711.Mapsmith/Dropped Maps/ |
| Exported pages | wherever you save them, as PDF files |
| Maps opened from Scrollkeeper | Scrollkeeper's downloads folder; Mapsmith only reads Scrollkeeper's map list |
The requirements and design are in docs/specs.
The map in the screenshot is Paizo's labeled world map of Golarion, published on the Paizo blog in Intro to Iblydos and used under Paizo's Community Use Policy. A square grid is drawn over it so Mapsmith has squares to find.
Mapsmith is released under the MIT license. It uses no third-party libraries.
Mapsmith uses trademarks and/or copyrights owned by Paizo Inc., used under Paizo's Community Use Policy (paizo.com/licenses/communityuse). We are expressly prohibited from charging you to use or access this content. Mapsmith is not published, endorsed, or specifically approved by Paizo. For more information about Paizo Inc. and Paizo products, visit paizo.com.
Pathfinder and Starfinder are registered trademarks and copyrights of Paizo Inc. Flip-Mat is a trademark of Paizo Inc. The app itself contains no Paizo content; the sample map appears only in this README.
To report a problem or ask a question, open an issue.