If you're talking about scanning a hardcopy paper map to create a digital imageWhile we're at it, those of us who have become cartographers after starting
out in other scientific or technical professions are almost invariably annoyed
by the use of the expression "scale" to describe a map. On paper maps, this
served a useful, immediate purpose. But the retention of this terminology for
digital mapping products is almost meaningless. What does it mean to say that
the DCW (etc.) mapping products are 1:1,000,000 scale? Even if you look at the
details of the scanning method, the smallest features certainly do not
correspond to the smallest features on high-quality paper maps scaled at
1-to-1million. Eventually, cartography will have to adopt the concept of
resolution --a map's quality is defined by the smallest detail that it can
faithfully resolve (or the smallest distance between neighboring items that it
can distinguish separately). A map can be printed or reproduced at almost any
linear scale today. But the resolution remains the same.