[Tex/LaTex] Pirate Treasure Map

fun

This one is mostly for fun, although seeing the TikZ tricks people come up with is often instructive. While I was looking for examples with torn pages, I ran across a few of these:

enter image description here

Can one draw pirate treasure maps like this in LaTeX, or is it just too far out? If the map itself is too difficult, just the 'burnt paper' edge effect would be interesting (although that should possibly be a separate question).

Best Answer

TikZ used to embed smaller parts of a bigger map - does not do burning, only random rough cropping:

\newcommand{\piecesofmap}[3]{\begin{center}\begin{tikzpicture} 
\clip [decorate, decoration={random steps,segment length=4pt,amplitude=1.5pt}] (#2) rectangle (#3);
\node [] {\includegraphics{#1}};
\end{tikzpicture}\end{center}}

This is used something like this:

\piecesofmap{NottinghamShire.pdf}{-2cm,-5cm}{3cm,-1cm}

In the end, it looks like this:

Map of Sherwood Forest

The Map itself is done in Inkscape. However the same big map is cut on the fly multiple times in the document to focus on different areas. The full (german) document can be found here.

But I've made not much progress creating brownish inner glows with TikZ to simulate the burning.