How do you make a tile map?

How do I make a custom offline map?

• I will be going to a convention in about a month and a half. Last year (at the same convention) I had trouble getting my hands on a map and figured it would be handy to have all the information on my phone which I'll be having with me anyway. I need help figuring out if I can do this. I will be going to SPIEL in Essen. It's a board gaming convention and there are hundreds of booths with publishers showing off their games. I would like a map and some way to search for exhibitors and have them be highlighted on the map in some way. I would also need for this to work offline as I (most likely) will not have any internet connection while there. To be clear: the map only needs to be of the insides of the convention halls. I would use this to get a general idea of where certain booths are, but also to figure out which direction I should be walking in to get to a certain booth. I would like to search by booth ID (there are tags stuck to each booth) as well as exhibitor name (though I guess they could be rolled into one), it would be a bonus if I could search by game as well (which would be linked to exhibitors). I don't know how to tackle this. It seems like someone would have had & solved a similar problem, but I haven't been able to find any solutions myself. What I've found has been solutions concerning outdoor maps (not having any custom layer), smaller amounts of markers and/or not working offline. If there's something out there that would be great, but I do have web related programming experience if that's needed. The organizers publish a definitive list of exhibitors as well as a map showing the locations of the booths in a PDF. The map will be split over multiple pages and each part at a slightly different scale. To give you an idea, http://imgur.com/511VeBx (pieced together) and to give you a sense of scale, that's about 250x300 meters. It seems this year there will be another hall added, so more space & booths. To sum up. I would like a map with a custom layer (the floor plan), hundreds of searchable locations and it has to work offline. If I can share the solution with other people that would be nice, but if not I have an iPhone so it at least has to work on that. Am I looking in the wrong direction? Is there some (reasonably) handy way to deal with this?

• Answer:

  I've never had any luck with custom maps on the iphone. Personally I prefer to mark up a map in advance, preferably with a red or blue pen.