Matte or museum paper for a map print

Two decisions hide in this: weight and surface. They do different jobs.

Weight is about handling

Paper weight is grams per square metre. A magazine page is around 100. A decent poster is 200. Heavy art stock is 300 and up.

What weight changes:

- Curl. Light paper remembers the tube. Heavy paper flattens within a day. - Feel. Weight is the first thing anyone notices when handed a print. It is most of what "quality" means before anything is on the wall. - Handling. Light paper creases at the corner while you get it into a frame.

What it does not change much: how it looks once it is behind glass. Framed, a 200 and a 300 are hard to tell apart at two metres.

Surface is about the room

This one is not a matter of taste.

A route print is a large field of one colour with a thin line across it. That empty field is most of the object, and a gloss finish makes it reflective. Every window and every lamp appears in the paper, and the reflection is exactly where the drawing is not.

Matte scatters. You can hang it opposite a window and still read it. On a two-colour print there is no colour depth being sacrificed — that argument applies to photographs, where gloss genuinely helps saturation.

There is no case for gloss here.

So

Matte 200 g is the right default. It is what most people should order and it is what the prints are shown in.

Museum 300 g earns its cost in one situation: unframed, given directly to somebody. The weight does the work in the first ten seconds, and those are the ten seconds a gift gets.

And what actually matters more

The line is printed at 300 dpi from vector geometry, not from a screenshot. That is the difference you can see across a room, and it is the same on both papers.