Very Large Maps, is it a problem?

[Hai-Etlik]

I'd suggest you work in a vector format, possibly even a geospatial vector format and use something like QuantumGIS.

Then you can make maps for any particular area in an appropriate projection and you can pretty them up in a raster graphics editor, or non-spatial vector editor.

I've been thinking of doing just this myself when I get some time.

[Yandor]

I find this discussion very interesting, cause you guys are talking about all this huge image size, but what dpi are you running it at? cause I ran a 3000x15000 300dpi (mind you I don't have the greatest computer) and it was running at a decent rate, faster than some large files I've ran... but just wondering, cause if your doing a 12,000x10,000 at 72 dpi thats a lot different than 300 dpi =D

I've had to break up into smaller manageable files at times, when the map had way too many layers for the size I was running it at, so that does help out a ton, excellent suggestions from everyone so far!

[Hai-Etlik]

The resolution is nothing more than a bit of metadata that suggest how large the image should be displayed or what size scanned/sampled. A 20k x 40x raster is a 20k x 40k raster regardless of whether you have a little tag that says 72dpi, 200dpi, or 20m/px.