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Topographic Maps
Turn a processed survey into a finished, client-ready plan — with one checkbox. The topographic map is a complete cartographic sheet: styled contour lines, buildings, roads, water, vegetation, a legend, a scale bar, a north arrow, and a professional title block, composed onto a real paper format at a true survey scale. It is delivered in two formats: an editable DXF drawing for CAD work and a printable PDF sheet for everyone else.
No CAD re-styling needed. This page explains what is on the sheet, how to customize it, and how to download each format.
What Is the Topographic Map?
Most Lidarvisor outputs are individual layers — a contour file here, a building file there. The topographic map is different: it is a deliverable document that combines the outputs you enabled into a single drawing, styled the way a topographic plan is conventionally drawn, and framed like a survey sheet you could hand directly to a client, an engineer, or a permit office.
To generate one, tick Generate Topographic Map in the processing options. After processing, it appears in the Reports section of the project tree.
The map is delivered in your project's coordinate system — the same CRS as your other vector outputs — and the title block states that coordinate system explicitly (name and EPSG code), so the recipient always knows what they are looking at.
What Is on the Sheet
The map compiles the outputs you enabled during processing, each on its own named CAD layer so you can toggle them individually in CAD software. Features you did not enable are simply absent — and the legend only lists what is actually on the map.
| Feature | How it is drawn |
|---|---|
| Contour lines | Brown, in the standard topographic convention: index contours (major interval) in dark brown, bold, with elevation labels; intermediate contours (minor interval) in lighter brown, thin, unlabeled |
| Elevation grid | Regular grid of spot elevations (only when the Grid option is enabled) |
| Buildings | Footprint outlines |
| Roads | Road linework |
| Railways | Rail lines with the classic cross-tie "ladder" symbol |
| Bridges | Heavier structure outlines |
| Power lines, towers, poles | Power line cables; towers as a square-with-X symbol, poles as a circle-with-dot symbol, so the two are distinguishable at a glance |
| Water | Water bodies as a solid light-blue fill with a bank line; shorelines as blue lines |
| Vegetation | Wooded areas as a transparent green tint; individual tree crowns at their real measured extent; tree tops as point symbols with height annotations |
| Breaklines | Terrain break lines in three levels of detail, with line weight indicating the level |
| Cadastral parcels | Thin dashed gray-brown boundaries with parcel reference labels — deliberately the most subdued style on the sheet, because they are indicative reference data, not surveyed features. A source credit for the cadastre data is printed on the sheet |
Contour labeling
Contour elevation labels are placed the way a cartographer would place them: rotated to follow the line, staggered so neighboring labels do not line up, and set on a small white mask so the contour never strikes through its own text. Only index contours carry labels — intermediate contours stay clean. Labels state the elevation in your project's unit (meters or feet).
Scale-aware symbology
Every symbol, label, and line pattern on the map is sized in paper millimeters against the chosen print scale — not in ground units. That means text and symbols stay the same legible size on the printed sheet whether your site fits at 1:200 or 1:5,000. A small site does not get giant labels, and a large one does not become unreadable.
The Map Collar
Around the map body, the sheet carries the standard furniture of a survey plan:
- Neatline — a border frame separating the map body from the margin.
- Coordinate grid — grid lines at round easting/northing intervals, labeled at the frame, so any point on the sheet can be located in the project CRS.
- Legend — keys every symbol actually present on the map; each legend patch matches the on-map symbol exactly.
- Scale bar — a graphic bar scale in round ground units, alongside the numeric ratio (e.g., 1:1000). The bar stays correct even if the sheet is later rescaled or photocopied.
- North arrow — grid north, top-right.
- Title block — a gridded, professional block at bottom-right (see below).
The title block
The title block follows standard engineering-drawing layout: a dominant title cell, an owner cell for your company, and structured rows for the key facts of the drawing:
- Map title, client, and "prepared by"
- Your company name and a document type line (defaults to "Topographic plan")
- Scale and coordinate system (name + EPSG code)
- North reference, date, drawing number, revision, and sheet number
All of these can be personalized before processing — see the next section.
Paper size and scale
The sheet is laid out on a real paper format — A0 by default for metric projects, ARCH D for US-unit projects — and the scale is selected automatically: the map picks the finest standard scale at which your site fits on the chosen paper (for metric projects, from 1:100 up to 1:10,000; for US-unit projects, standard inch-to-foot ratios such as 1" = 10' or 1" = 100'). If a site is too large for even the coarsest standard scale, the sheet is labeled with its true exact scale rather than a misleading round one.
Customizing Your Map
When Generate Topographic Map is ticked, a Customize button appears beneath it. It opens the "Customize topographic map" dialog, where you can personalize the sheet before processing — so the delivered drawing needs no CAD rework.
| Field | What it does | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Title | The map title in the title block | Your project name |
| Company | The issuing firm — the title block's owner cell | Your account's company name |
| Document type | Subtitle under the company (e.g., "Topographic plan") | "Topographic plan" |
| Client | The client line in the title block | Empty |
| Prepared by | The surveyor/author line | Your name |
| Paper size | A0 (841 × 1189 mm), A1 (594 × 841 mm), A3 (297 × 420 mm), or ARCH D (24 × 36 in) | A0 (metric projects) / ARCH D (US-unit projects) |
| Colour scheme | How structural linework is colored — see below | Technical (CAD colours) |
| Drawing no. | Drawing/reference number in the title block | Empty |
| Rev | Revision index | A |
| Background imagery | Which raster images the map sits on — see below | None (clean vector-only map) |
Every field is optional. Leave the dialog untouched and you get a correctly-titled map with sensible defaults. The coordinate system is not editable here — it belongs to the project, and changing it on a title block would mis-describe the drawing.
Note: The scale is chosen automatically at render time to fit your site on the selected paper. There is no manual scale field — a value chosen before the map is laid out could easily not fit.
Color Schemes
The map ships in one of two color presets, chosen in the customization dialog:
| Scheme | Look | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Technical (CAD colours) — the default | Each discipline gets a distinct color: buildings and bridges orange, utilities red, roads yellow, railways magenta, breaklines cyan. Buildings carry a light fill so footprints read as areas on screen | Working on the drawing in CAD — layers are separable at a glance |
| Cartographic (print) | Structural linework in black — a finished, printed-plan look. (In CAD model space, the linework auto-inverts to white on a dark background, so it stays legible there too) | Printing, or handing over a classic plan |
In both schemes, the thematic colors stay conventional: contours brown, water blue, vegetation green. The legend always matches the chosen scheme — in Technical, for example, the building patch is shown filled, exactly as buildings appear on the map.
Background Imagery
By default the map is a clean, vector-only drawing. In the customization dialog you can choose raster imagery to sit beneath the vectors:
- Orthophoto
- Hillshade (derived from the DTM)
- DSM
- CHM
- Slope
Ticking an imagery option automatically enables its source raster in the processing options (selecting Hillshade turns on DTM generation, and so on) — you are never blocked by a missing prerequisite. Unticking the source raster later clears the matching imagery.
One important behavior, stated in the dialog itself: the DXF references these images — it does not include them. The topographic map download stays a single, small drawing file. To see the imagery in CAD, download each selected raster from its own entry in the project tree and place the files in the same folder as the DXF; CAD software then displays them automatically. The PDF sheet has the imagery drawn in — nothing to place alongside it.
Note: On projects where you uploaded your own orthophoto, the Orthophoto option is shown disabled — the map cannot reference an externally-supplied image.
Downloading: DXF or PDF
Clicking the topographic map's download button opens a two-option picker:
| Option | What it is |
|---|---|
| DXF drawing (preselected) | The editable CAD drawing, with every feature on its own layer. Open it in AutoCAD, Civil 3D, BricsCAD, or QGIS. Use this when you are going to work on the map. |
| Printable PDF sheet | The same sheet, at the scale printed on its title block, ready to plot or send to a client. Nothing to open in CAD, nothing to set up. |
Both are the same document — one drawing, two formats. Each download is a single file, not an archive.
About the PDF sheet
- True size, true scale. The PDF page is the sheet's physical paper size, and the drawing sits on it at exactly the scale the title block states. Print it at 100% and a scale rule works on it.
- Crisp collar. The title block, legend, scale bar, and labels are vector graphics — they stay sharp at any zoom. The map body is rendered as a high-resolution (300 dpi) image, which keeps the file small enough to email.
- Not text-searchable. Text in the PDF is drawn as outlines, so you cannot select or search it. The DXF remains the format for anything you need to query or edit.
- Imagery included. Any background imagery you selected is drawn into the PDF — no companion files needed.
- Older maps. Maps processed before the PDF format existed have the drawing only. Regenerating the report (for example, after editing a vector layer) produces the sheet; from then on both formats are available.
Common Uses
- Surveyors delivering a finished topographic plan to clients without re-styling in AutoCAD
- Civil engineers using the drawing as a base for design work
- Architects incorporating terrain and site features into plans
- Permit applicants submitting a printable, scaled site plan to authorities
- Anyone without CAD — the PDF sheet needs nothing but a PDF viewer or a plotter
Next Step
The topographic map is one of several client-ready documents Lidarvisor generates. See the rest — forest inventories, vegetation risk reports — in Reports.