Question: Is there a way to download a region from Google maps to a PDF or JPEG file? I would like to download as many zoom levels as possible so I can zoom in and out without being online. I need this for practical reasons when I will be traveling to remote China and I need detailed maps of certain provinces/counties.I will be browsing these maps on an iPod touch.

I only need the street information, so only the "map" part of gmaps.

Answer: 
GoogleMaps is now offering 'off-line' mode, so you can do this without any GIS or programming at all. The trick is you'll need Android Ice Cream Sandwich or Jelly Bean: [A new Google Maps app for smartphone and tablets](http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-new-google-maps-app-for-smartphone.html)

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> The offline maps feature for Android is also no longer available. Instead we’ve created a new way for you to access maps offline by simply entering “OK Maps” into the search box when viewing the area you want for later. Finally, My Maps functionality is not supported in this release but will return to future versions of the app. People who want to create powerful custom maps can still do so with Maps Engine Lite on desktop.
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It would probably be easiest in Google Earth, where you can directly save the extents to a JPEG. If you have a Pro Account, you can set the output resolution and also save to PDF.
[Source](http://support.google.com/earth/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=148146).

You might also be interested in [this](http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/earth/6NpHZIbu8Fs) which explains caching various places so that Google Earth can be used in offline mode. You can store up to 2GB of imagery this way, which is quite substantial.

Edit: Per your edit, it seems that GE is not for what you are looking. A manual way to solve your question would be to "print" the current view, which opens a new window. From there you can save the page as `Web Page, complete` (in Firefox), which saves a folder containing the image. Inside said folder is an image aptly named staticmap.png.

You don't need to change the URL if you pan/zoom around, so you can save the page multiple times, thereby giving you your desired maps.

Assuming you save the files to a folder, this Python script will move all the images in the subfolders to the main folder specified at run time.

```python
from Tkinter import Tk
from tkFileDialog import askdirectory
import os, shutil

Tk().withdraw()
folder = askdirectory()

for i,dirname in enumerate([x[0] for x in os.walk(folder) if x[0] != folder]):

    old = "{0}\\staticmap.png".format(dirname)
    name, ext = os.path.splitext(old)
    new = "{0}{1}{2}".format(name, i, ext)

    os.rename(old, new)
    shutil.move(new, folder)

```