Displaying and Printing LAQuads

Here are some brief instructions on how to use our LAQuads web page to display and print a road-map version of Louisiana 1:24,000, (7.5-minute) quad maps. (At the bottom are some notes on modifications to this page.)

To Begin

First, you'll need the title of the Louisiana 1:24,000/7.5-minute quad.

If you're using this page for the Winter Bird Atlas it's probably easiest to try one of these: You can click here for the USGS index or here for a PDF* document showing Louisiana quads or here for a quad-finder page from LSU.
*This is a PDF document requiring Adobe Acrobat Reader. Click here for more this.

Alternatively (and if Google Earth is installed on your system), you can click here to find the appropriate quad. Make sure you've selected View>Sidebar, double-clicked the "Places" heading to open that, scrolled down to "Temporary Places", and make sure "Louisiana Quads" is checked. Then, just point to and click within the red outline of the quad (you can zoom in for more detail) and click one of the small boxes that display. In the bubble that pops up, read the quad title in bold below the number (like "154-A") and above the USGS number. Again, the USGS and LSU sites are probably easier.

Remember: What you're looking for here is the quad title.

Displaying A Quad

The rest is easy.
  1. Point to the box at the right of "Louisiana 24K (7.5-minute) quad title:" and select the quad by title. If you press the key corresponding to the first letter of the title (such as "F" for "Folsom") the list will go to the first title starting with that letter. If you press Alt+Down, the list will open. You can use Down and/or Up or your mouse pointer to select the quad you want.
  2. With the quad title selected, press Tab to move to Display Quad and press Enter or just click on Display Quad with your mouse.
The map below will zoom in on the appropriate portion of the state and highlight the quad area in red.

The beauty of using Google Maps like this is that you can zoom in and drag the map around to get more detail and/or to show only a portion of the quad 7.5-minute area. Or you can zoom out to see how the quad fits into the surrounding area. (Yeah, we love Google Maps!)

Printing

Please review the following before printing a map.

Browser problems

Each of the several browsers "out there" -- even different versions of the same browser -- render pages differently, especially overlays such as this page uses. Factor in the thousands of printers, and, sadly, the best word to describe printing these maps is unpredictabe! There are just too many combinations of browsers, browser settings, printers, and printer settings to deal with this programatically.

Our best suggestions are: (1) Download and install the latest version of Firefox*. It's the best and "only" browser to use. (2) Check File>Page Setup>Shrink To Fit Page Width (see below). Those seem to fix most problems. If you still can't print these maps, please feel free to contact us here and we'll do our best to help.
*Versions prior to 3.x did have problems, but the latest doesn't.

Printer Setup

We have optimized this page for the largest printable map -- based on monitor resolution, paper size (8.5 X 11), and Google map requirements.

The displayed map will print best if your margins are set to "zero". To do this go to File>Page Setup in your browser and change all four margin settings to zero. Actually, the browser will not accept exactly zero, as printers do not usually print edge to edge, and entering zero will change to "0.25" or "0.166" or something similar. Also, if your browser has a setting that forces the image to fit (such as Shrink To Fit Page Width), please try that. Don't forget to click OK after keying the changes.

Print the map

Just click Print to print the map as you would any document. Or, you can select File>Print Preview to check the layout before printing. (Note: the rendering engine in Internet Explorer -- what happens between your clicking Print and the displaying of the print dialog -- is sslllooowww, so please wait for it to work.

Again, you can zoom in or out and drag for different portions of the map. What you see in the map area is what will print.

If you're really obsessive, you can click hybrid and (depending on the resolution and data available from Google) see a photo-like view of the topography. All of these should print, though maybe not very clearly.

Printing in Black & White

Google renders their maps in color, and they print fine on color printers. On "monochrome" or black-and-white printers (such as LaserJets) the images are somewhat washed out. We don't know of any good solutions to this. Please contact us if this is a problem.

-- 2.21.2007


Notes

We don't know why, but the Google API does not zoom in on the red outline exactly the same for all quads. When this happens, one or two of the box borders are just outside the map view on the top and/or the bottom. If you zoom out one notch, you'll see what we mean. Since it's so close, this shouldn't be a problem, but we're continually modifying the code to accomodate this issue. So, if you select a title and don't see the whole red quad border, please click here and let us know.
-- 2.23.2007