Paper maps have been used for centuries. Paper maps are relatively inexpensive and so are available to most people. They are portable and compact, they just fold up and go in your pack. Probably you have used a paper map before in some form, either a bus route map, a road map, while camping or hiking, or a map in your school atlas that you needed to look at for course-work. Paper maps are familiar to people, and most of us can use a map to get from one place to another.

Paper maps have disadvantages too. They are not as easily updated as digital maps. Because of their permanent format; when new updated information such as newly built roads becomes available to cartographers, whole new maps must be drawn instead of just updating one part of the map, in this case the roads. Paper maps can become physically damaged more easily than digital maps. If you take your map on a camping trip for instance, it could get wet or torn unless you have protected it with some form of lamination.

Finally, paper maps are usually based on only one theme, such as road maps, land use maps, or geological maps.