freemapper

What it makes

• A georeferenced map for OpenOrienteering Mapper (.omap), on request also for OCAD. Buildings, paved areas, paths, stairs, walls, water and other reliable objects are drawn already.
• Templates for mapping: aerial photo, hillshade, slope, local relief and the height of the vegetation.
• Candidates: what is uncertain (street furniture, many paths, banks and knolls from the terrain, out-of-bounds areas) is in a map of its own, to check against the aerial photo and in the terrain. The check print draws every candidate true to position.
• A training map to print and run on as it is: map and candidates together, cleaned up so that no symbol lies on another.
• Permit notes: Kreis, municipality, protected areas, natural monuments, monuments, forest and forest office in the map area, and whom one usually asks before an event. A hint, not legal advice.

Map kinds

freemapper knows fifteen German states, all except Thuringia. How good the map gets depends on the data of the state; the manual names them for each, the examples show a sprint and a forest map for each.

Install

Download the archive for your system below and unpack it. The folder holds the program freemapper (on Windows freemapper.exe) with the manual and the licence.

• macOS starts a program from the internet only once the quarantine flag is gone: xattr -d com.apple.quarantine freemapper
• Windows shows "Windows protected your PC" on the first start: More info → Run anyway.
• Linux: the programs run on any distribution.

freemapper --version shows that it worked. Later, freemapper update fetches the newest version.

The first map

freemapper init schoolyard --place "Clara-Zetkin-Schule Strausberg" --kind schoolyard
freemapper run schoolyard --pdf --training

To draw the area on a map instead, freemapper select schoolyard opens the area page in the browser. An AI assistant such as Claude or Codex can install and run freemapper itself; its instructions are in AGENTS.md.