Large Texas map
Sheet TX-04 · full screen · print-ready
One big map, nothing else on the page. Zoom, pan, then print: the header and footer are hidden automatically so the map fills the sheet.
Tip: for a wall-size print, zoom to level 7 and print in landscape on A3 / 11×17. For a blank outline see the blank Texas map.
Reading this map
At the default zoom the map shows the whole state with the 17 largest cities labeled. Zoom in once for county seats and U.S. highways, twice for county boundaries and state highways, and further for streets. The base map is OpenStreetMap, updated continuously.
Texas spans 10.7 degrees of longitude and 10.7 degrees of latitude. Printed at 1:1,000,000 the state is about 4.1 feet across and 4.2 feet tall; at 1:3,000,000 it comes to roughly 16 by 17 inches, which wants an A2 sheet rather than 11×17. Road-atlas scale (1:750,000) would take 24 sheets of 11×17, six across and four down.
What you can see at each zoom level
| Zoom | What appears | Typical use |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | Texas with Oklahoma, New Mexico, Louisiana and northern Mexico in the same frame | Placing the state — see the Texas on the US map |
| 6 | The whole state, the interstates, the largest cities labeled | Default view and the one-sheet overview print |
| 7 | County outlines and county seats, U.S. routes, the big reservoirs | Wall map; pairs with the lakes map |
| 8–9 | State highways and farm-to-market roads, named rivers, small towns | Route planning — compare the highway map and rivers map |
| 10–12 | City street grid, arterials, parks, neighborhood names | Finding a suburb or a state park |
| 13+ | Individual streets, addresses, building footprints | Street level; walking and parking |
Printing this map
The page is built for paper. In the browser's print view the site header, the breadcrumb line, the footer and the related-links block are all hidden, and the map box grows to about 90 percent of the sheet height, so what prints is the map and its caption. Two settings in the print dialog matter: switch background graphics on, or the tiles come out blank, and set margins to minimum. The browser's own header and footer — URL, date, page number — are a separate checkbox in the same dialog.
Letter (8.5 × 11 in) holds the whole state at roughly 1:6,500,000, about 103 miles to the inch: readable for a route overview, too coarse for county names. A3 or 11 × 17 gets to about 1:4,900,000, near 77 miles to the inch, which is where county seats and U.S. route numbers start to hold up. For anything larger, print a grid: six 11 × 17 sheets in portrait, three across and two down, trimmed and taped, make a map about 33 × 34 inches at roughly 23 miles to the inch — near 1:1,500,000, close to a road atlas.
Orientation is close to a coin flip, and it is the short side of the paper that decides the scale. The state measures 801 miles north to south and 773 miles east to west, so its bounding box is nearly square: fitting it on a sheet means fitting 773 miles across 8.5 or 11 inches, not 801 miles down the long edge. That is why a single sheet lands at a coarser scale than the paper's long dimension suggests. Portrait wastes slightly less paper on the full state; landscape suits a zoomed strip such as the I-35 corridor or the Gulf Coast.
The tiles use Web Mercator, so printed scale is not constant: a mile in the Panhandle takes more paper than a mile at Brownsville.
How big the state actually is
Texas covers 268,596 square miles, second only to Alaska, and the 801-by-773-mile span is why it resists a single sheet at any working scale. The four extreme points sit in four different corners of the map, each in a county with its own page.
| Extreme | Where | County | Approx. |
|---|---|---|---|
| North | The straight top edge of the Panhandle at 36°30′ N | Dallam east to Lipscomb | 36.5° N |
| South | The Rio Grande's last bend below Brownsville | Cameron | 25.8° N |
| East | The Sabine River on the Louisiana line | Newton | 93.5° W |
| West | The Rio Grande upstream of El Paso | El Paso | 106.6° W |
Driving is the other way to read the scale. I-10 crosses the state from the New Mexico line west of El Paso to the Louisiana line at Orange in about 880 miles — 12 to 13 hours without stops, and longer than the run from New York to Chicago. North to south, US-83 goes from Brownsville on the Rio Grande to the Oklahoma line above Perryton, roughly 900 miles of mostly two-lane road and the better part of two days. Zoom the map along either route and watch the towns thin out west of the 100th meridian. For relief rather than distance, the elevation map covers the climb from sea level to 8,751 ft at Guadalupe Peak, and the metro areas map shows where the population that fills the eastern third of this sheet actually sits.