I needed a map of “where the Games and Politics exhibition has been” for a talk. ZKM + Goethe-Institut, twenty-something venues across four continents, ten years of touring. Google Maps screenshots are ugly. Mapbox-via-API is overkill for one slide. Drawing it in Inkscape is the kind of fiddly that consumes a whole afternoon.

So: dynamic-travel-path-visualizer. Click waypoints on a Leaflet map, get an animated path between them, export the result as SVG. No backend, no API key, runs locally in a browser tab.

The problem with the alternatives

Every “travel map generator” I tried failed in one of two ways:

• Tile-screenshot tools bake the tile imagery into the export, which is ugly at slide resolution and licensing-awkward to put in a printed catalogue.
• Mapbox / programmatic tools give you exactly what you want, eventually, after you’ve configured an account, picked a style, written some JS, and dealt with attribution. Great for production. Wrong tool for “I have one map to make tonight.”

What I actually wanted was: drop pins, draw a line, export the line and the pins, not the map underneath them. That’s a pretty narrow tool, and I couldn’t find it.

What it does

• Click to add waypoints on a Leaflet map (the map is just there to help you place pins; it doesn’t end up in the export)
• Animated paths between waypoints — useful when the SVG is consumed by something that respects SMIL animation, or for screen recording
• SVG export — the pins, the path, no tile imagery, scalable to any slide or print resolution
• Customisable styling — colours, line widths, marker styles

The export is plain SVG, no exotic features, opens in Illustrator or Inkscape if you want to keep editing.

Tech

Vanilla JavaScript and Leaflet, no build step, no package manager required to run it. The whole thing is one HTML file plus a small JS bundle. You can host it on any static-file server or open the HTML directly from disk. I’m running mine off the same host as the rest of my site.

This is the boring, useful kind of project. It existed in my head for about an hour, took an evening to build, and has saved me a couple of afternoons since. Posting it in case anyone else has been searching for the same shape of tool.