A long time ago, on a planet that looks very similar to Sadwillow...
It's really, really shocking how fast you can learn things when you're completely ignorant.
So now, I'm using the blurred outline effect. Next thing I learn, is to apply the effect not to the text objects themselves, but to the layers I put each class of label into(cities, capital cities, mountains, islands, continents, rivers, etc.). I decide to try this out on a more realistic backdrop. So I start from scratch. Well, kinda...
I start by creating a new document with a 2048x1024 artboard. I import my Wilbur map of Kazh(Which used to be Sadwillow, but I've made some changes, heheh). Now I create a set of layers: Hypsometric Raster, Hillshade Raster, Rivers Raster, City Markers, Capital City Labels, City Labels, Ocean Labels, etc. This makes it easier to alter settings later. Say, you decided to do the river labels in black with a thick white feathered glow, then you decide later to go with a simple thin black outline around light blue text. You just alter the effects for the River Labels layer. Then I think you can alter the color of the River Text character style and have it apply to your existing labels. Everything else remains untouched. Noice.
I've also gotten into the habit of putting all of my text onto a path. Just draw a quick line with the pencil tool go to Object>Path>Simplify... set your precision to about zero and then hover the text tool over the line till the text icon gets a line through it, then click down to place your text. You can go back and alter the curve to your heart's content later.
Mostly, this was about seeing how my text looks on a more complex background.
EDIT: Okay this needs a lot of edits since I started on the post last night.
First, I give up on freaking Live Trace. It may have it's place, like digitizing continent outlines from an ocean mask(maybe), but it's a total bust for finding center lines of a set of river traces. I'll have to see if I can find something equivalent to the tool I was using in ArcGIS.
@tilt: Yeah, I kinda figured that was what you meant. With the effects I was using when I started this, that's about what I was doing. If I make any changes to the text, I'd have to completely redo all the effects. By hand, for every text item I changed. That could get ugly.
I think the outline with a feather effect is mostly FTW. Yay!
@Gamerprinter, again: I'd probably never buy Illustrator again, but I have it and at the moment if a replacement isn't free like party-crash beer it isn't an option for me.
@Redrobes: I haven't used ImageMagick in ages. My version is probably at least two years old... That's pretty much just a raster app, isn't it? I remember it having much more flexible resampling options than Photoshop and I thought it had some stuff like morphological dilate and erode.
If I'm confident that I have my text content finalized and my character styles the way I want them I could paste all my text into a Photoshop layer as rasterized text. I'm fairly happy with Photoshop's effects(so far). This reminds me that I should update Image Magick on my computer, though. I'll have a look-see.
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