Free Town/City/Region/Area Mapper or Designer Needed. Ideas?

[sgmalice]

Thats great guys, I appreciate the advice.

I guess that stands to be true about the time consumption on doing any sort of decent map. I don't mind putting in the time as long as the reward of having a nicely finished map to better represent the world I'm designing.

I've been using ProFantasy's Fractal Terrain and it generates awesome realistic continents but the only problem with FT is you can't label anything, or resize the map to print on a full 8x11 sheet. I see that it only prints a miniature right in the center of the sheet and it's not very good quality. So what I've done is export the "map" in question to PhotoShop and then did any editing through there. But again once I printed it, with labels of the regions and the proper 8x11 size... I noticed that the resolution of the map looked horrible once it was printed. I'm using the Lexmark X5690 All-In-One InkJet, with photo-print capability. I'm trying to get my map to print with as good resolution as it's shown on-screen, but onto paper. I wonder if it's my printer settings or perhaps even the printer itself, do I need a Laser Printer to get that kind of quality or can I pull it off with an InkJet?

Or is there some way to get a better print resolution through some editing?

I've also been snaring images of terrain, towns, cities, roads and all kinds of interesting things so that I can break them up into pieces in photo shop and sort of piece together a new map with my own customization. Tedious, but do-able.

Any other thoughts you folks might have?

[HandsomeRob]

is there some way to get a better print resolution through some editing?

When you get a view in FT that you want to make a map from, save the file as a jpg but set your width to a very large number (I use 4800)... Remember, for good resolution you will need 300 pixels per inch, so for an 8.5 x 11 sheet you want at least 2550 x 3300 pixels in your starting image.

[sgmalice]

When you get a view in FT that you want to make a map from, save the file as a jpg but set your width to a very large number (I use 4800)... Remember, for good resolution you will need 300 pixels per inch, so for an 8.5 x 11 sheet you want at least 2550 x 3300 pixels in your starting image.

Rob,

Thats awesome bro, thanks. I had no idea it worked like that. I'll try that right now.

[sgmalice]

When you get a view in FT that you want to make a map from, save the file as a jpg but set your width to a very large number (I use 4800)... Remember, for good resolution you will need 300 pixels per inch, so for an 8.5 x 11 sheet you want at least 2550 x 3300 pixels in your starting image.

So save my map in FT in JPG format with a width of at least 4800, then export it to PS, then make sure the image is 2550 x 3300 pixels? Will that still print on an 8x11?