A guide to the Settings window in Route by Zaweba

Route by Zaweba keeps its Settings window short on purpose. There are only a handful of choices, but each one shapes how the app behaves every day, so it pays to look through them once when you first install it and again before you prepare a big map region.

The settings cover five things: where your map regions are kept, whether distances are shown in miles or kilometres, your fuel economy and fuel price, whether new routes avoid motorways, and how much memory to give the preparation of the routing graph and map tiles.

Where your maps live

Prepared map regions take real disk space. A small county is a few megabytes to download, but a whole country is far larger once its address index, routing graph and tiles have been built. Settings lets you choose the folder they are kept in, which is handy if your main drive is small and you have a roomier one.

There is one rule: the folder must not be inside the app's own folder. Keeping maps apart from the program means an update or reinstall of Route never touches the regions you have spent time preparing. Pick a plain folder of its own, on whichever drive has room, and leave it there.

If you want to see what is already stored, Map has an Open the regions folder command that shows the current location in File Explorer.

Miles, kilometres and fuel

Distances can be shown in miles and yards, which is the default, or in kilometres. The same choice is on the View menu, so you can switch quickly without opening Settings. It changes how distances read in the directions, the leg totals and the route as a whole.

Fuel economy is entered in miles per imperial gallon and the fuel price in pounds per litre. With both filled in, Route shows the fuel cost of the route or round you are planning. Both fields must be numbers, so type 45 rather than about 45, and 1.52 rather than a price with a pound sign in front of it. If you change vehicles, or prices move, update them here and the cost follows.

Avoiding motorways on new routes

Some drivers never want motorways: a slow van, a towing job, a nervous learner or simply a preference for quieter roads. Settings can make motorway avoidance the starting point for new routes, so you do not have to remember to tick it each time.

Like the other avoid options, this is a strong preference rather than an absolute ban. Route will still reach a place that can only be reached by a motorway, rather than refusing to plan at all. You can still change the choice on any individual route.

Memory for preparing maps

The last setting is the one most people never touch, and that is fine. It is the memory, in megabytes, used for building the routing graph and map tiles when a region is prepared. Zero means automatic, and Route picks a sensible amount for you.

Big regions can need more. Great Britain is about 2 GB to download and needs roughly 8 GB of free memory to prepare, while a county needs very little. If a large preparation struggles, closing other programs to free memory is the first thing to try, and raising this figure is the second. If your PC has plenty of memory and you prepare large regions often, setting it by hand can help. If not, leave it at zero.

This setting only affects preparing maps. Planning routes, searching addresses and browsing the map afterwards are not changed by it.

Getting the settings right first time

A good order on a new install is this: choose the regions folder before you prepare anything, so you never have to move maps later; set your units; put in your vehicle's fuel figures; decide whether motorways should be avoided by default. Then choose a region and let it prepare.

After that, Settings is something you visit rarely, which is how it should be. Route then gets on with planning, offline, with the choices you made once.