Giving players access to more pages (World Maps)

In my campaign I have a world map that I am using for multiple things, (tracking where the players are in the world, calculating distances and travel times, moving tribes of monsters when events happen to justify it).  It's really easy to just pick up the party's token and place it where they are going next. If I was to give the players GM access so that they could see the world map, they would see too much, as I am using the GM layer to hide encounters I've already created but they don't know about yet. I would love to give my players access to this map freely rather than forcing them to switch to it when it's time to talk about the world map.  It has been suggested that handouts can fill this function, but as fluid as my map may end up being, and also that I am really awful with other photo editing software, I don't know that this would work for me.

I personally give my players a handout of the maps for personal reference between looking at the map page. In cases where the map is far to large I will make small snips of the local area they are in. It's the closest I can get to giving them access, granted they can't measure and track tokens.

Sam: Slightly convoluted solution, but try running two campaigns: one for worldmap, one for encounters.  In the Worldmap campaign, players are ALWAYS on the worldmap, and can move themselves as needed, etc.  Should solve your problem short-term.

Take your world map and put it in something like a public folder of Dropbox. Get the public link. Create a "Campaign Resources" handout. In that handout (among other things) include a link to that file. Players can click on it when they like and it will put the map in a separate tab.

Huh. Nifty idea Kevin. Also brings to mind the idea of playing a meta campaign on a larger or global scale. Would keep that sort of information separate and reduce clutter in the main play area. When we were playing a lot of Call of Cthulhu where character mortality can be sudden, we often kept a stable of characters on the go so that the bigger-picture storyline could be maintained.

Personally, I would love to be able to set multiple pages as "visible to players"and let the players switch between them just like the dm can on the dm side. sure, we have workarounds we can do but none are great. I can think of at least 3 pages I would have set to be "visible" at all times: World map, the mess around page for when we are waiting for somebody or puzzle notes or ... , and the current map for the fight