Terrain Mapper
The compiler needs a wide screen to be usable — the parameter column and the sheet preview sit side by side, and the preview is meant to be read while you change the symbology.
Open anywayEverything runs inside your browser. There is no upload path in the tool at all: rasters, shapefiles and photographs are read in the tab and never leave the machine.
DL-TerrainMapper turns terrain and field observations into a drawing a laser cutter can make — where the symbology maps to machine operations rather than to screen pixels.
The preview cannot lie.
A laser-cut map compiler · open source (Apache‑2.0) · v0.1.0 · runs in the browser, nothing to install
A map drawn on screen and a map cut in card are not the same object, and the usual workflow keeps them apart: you draw, you export, you discover at the machine what the export actually did. Here there is one compiled drawing. The preview you read, the SVG you file and the DXF you send to the cutter are all rendered from that same object — none of them builds its own geometry, so none of them can quietly disagree with the others.
What that buys is boring and valuable: the line you see is the line that will be cut, on the pass it will be cut on. Colour here is not decoration — each colour is a laser pass, which is how the passes are identified at the machine.
No power and speed settings ship with it.
Those belong to a machine and a material, not to a drawing. A file that carried them would be asserting something about a cutter and a sheet of card it has never met. The drawing names the passes; the workshop decides what each pass does.
One raster, several translations
The same surface can be told in different ways, and the choice is a design decision rather than a setting. Each translation below is a different answer to the question of how a measured value becomes a mark that a machine can make — and they compose, so a sheet can carry more than one at once.
Contours
Value as a line’s position — the familiar one, with index lines on their own pass.
Hachures
Strokes down the fall line, after Lehmann: steeper ground reads darker.
Modulated contours
Value as ink along a line, so a single line carries a second reading.
Circle grid
Value as symbol size, sign as its form — a grading plan’s cut and fill.
Hatching
Value as ink density across an area.
Sections
Height against distance along a cut through the ground.
Regions
One threshold, and the ground beyond it becomes a second material.
Image halftones
A photograph as engraved dots — preview only where the licence says so.
How it is checked
The tool ships with 444 checks, and each one asserts a property that would otherwise be discovered on material: a contour that closes, a label that sits on its line, a sheet that fits the bed, a DXF layer that names the pass it claims. They run with start.bat test and need Node — the tool itself needs nothing.
Checks are not the same as a slow human look at the interface, and this tool has had more of the former than the latter so far.
Take it apart
| Source | github.com/DLandscapes/dl-terrain-mapper |
|---|---|
| Also hosted | dlandscapes.github.io/dl-terrain-mapper — the same tool, served from the repository itself |
| Version | v0.1.0, untagged. Shipped early on purpose, and still moving. |
| Licence | Apache‑2.0. The two typefaces it redistributes keep their own OFL licences, travelling beside the files they cover. |
| Data | None is shipped that is not generated: the demonstration landform is built in code and the test fixtures are synthesised. Nothing you load leaves your machine. |
Provided as is, without warranty of any kind — see the Apache‑2.0 licence for the full terms. Verify before you cut: check scale, sheet size and pass assignment in the exported files before sending anything to a machine, and treat laser safety, material choice and extraction as the operator’s responsibility. This software only produces drawings.
Developed by Digital Landscapes with AI assistance. The design decisions, the symbology and all verification are Digital Landscapes’ own.