Attached are photographs of an old printed map — a survey sheet, a pictorial
atlas page, a cantonment plan. Recreate it as an interactive web page I can
explore and teach from. You are not copying the artwork; you are rebuilding
the sheet's *idea* in a form that can be panned, zoomed and questioned.

## What I am sending with this brief

- One straight-on, full-frame photograph in good light.
- Close-ups of: the title block, the legend, the key or index if there is
  one, all four corners (the graticule numbers live there), and the bottom
  margin — the scale bar and the printing code, which is where the date hides.
- One or two sentences on why this map stopped me, and who the page is for.

If my photographs are missing any of these, ask for them before you start.
The difference between a recreation and a guess is usually one close-up.

## Step 0 — study the sheet before drawing anything

Read everything legible and report it back to me first: the mapping agency,
the scale and its units, the geographic extent, the printing date, the legend
entries, the key of named places. Fact-check the sheet's own story — who made
it, in what tradition, and correct my assumptions out loud. (I once had a
Survey of India sheet down as "some British geologist's work." The correction
became the best part of the page.)

## Step 1 — the fidelity contract

Divide the sheet into what you will TRACE and what you will STYLISE, and put
that division on the finished page in plain words.

- **Trace** everything checkable: place names, spot heights, the road and
  rail network, symbols, water, the graticule, the scale, the frame.
- **Stylise** what cannot be honestly reproduced — terrain texture, hachures,
  contour fields. Generate them to evoke the original's hand, and say so.
- The paper original stays the authority. The page is the toy that teaches
  you to read it.

## Step 2 — the sheet's material truth

Keep its identity: the paper colour, the lettering conventions, the ink
palette, the border and neatlines, the legend as an object on the sheet.
If my site has an existing map page, make this one its sibling — same page
chrome, same "atlas corner" idiom. Dark mode is the map room at night: the
chrome darkens, the sheet stays paper. It is an object, like a framed print.

## Step 3 — the drill-down

- Pan and zoom (drag, wheel, pinch). Detail must ARRIVE with depth — big
  names at arm's length, spot heights and minor names only when you lean in,
  the way a real sheet rewards a magnifying glass.
- A clickable key of named places: tap a name, the map flies there and opens
  a small card with that place's story.
- Layer toggles: terrain, water, roads, names, grid.
- A live scale bar in the sheet's own units, recomputed as I zoom — "one
  inch of screen is now N yards" is the sentence that makes scale real.

## Step 4 — the teaching layer

Below the map, the five or six things I would point at to teach someone to
read this sheet: its scale trick, what its contour or terrain marks mean,
its symbols and abbreviations, its measurement story (triangulation, chains,
whatever its tradition used), its units. Write them for the person named in
the brief, not for cartographers.

## Where it lives

Build it as a private artifact first so I can play with it and correct you
against the real sheet. Port it to the site only when I say so — and then
with the full house registration: sitemap, generated surfaces, share card,
cross-links to its sibling pages.

## Rules

- Never reproduce the original artwork of an in-copyright map. Facts, names,
  geography and conventions are free; the drawing must be your own.
- Every claim on the page must be traced from the photographs or verified
  independently. Where you cannot read the sheet, leave it out — do not
  invent plausible details in an old map's voice.
- Keep my "why" in the page. Without it this is a demo; with it, it is mine.

## Traps that cost time

- Page-level design tokens colliding with the site stylesheet's tokens — a
  heading can silently render invisible in one theme. Name the map page's
  tokens uniquely and test BOTH themes before calling it done.
- Dense name clusters collide when labels are placed by formula. Support
  per-label overrides (anchor, offset) from the start.
- The printing date is almost never in the title — it is in the margin
  fine-print. So are the surveyor's disclaimers, which are often the most
  human thing on the sheet.
- A second, better photograph halfway through is normal. Ask for it early;
  it will unlock names and dates the first one blurred.

## Report back

1. Everything you read off the sheet in step 0, and what you corrected.
2. The trace/stylise division as it will appear on the page.
3. Screenshots in both themes, at rest and mid-zoom.
4. What you could not read or verify, listed — not silently omitted.