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: 
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)

```
Also try Google Maps Downloader from <http://www.bigeastsolutions.com/index.html>
You can download Google satellite maps