How do YOU create various resolutions of the same map?

[Jaxilon]

Somehow I think I am failing to state my question accurately.

Let me try another way:

You are hired to create a world map and several regional maps of said world. Lets say they plan to hang them on their wall. Obviously the regional maps will show more detail than the world map but you still want them to have the same shape and major features.

I guess if it were in vector you can shrink and expand the areas as needed but you still deal with what detail to show or not as well as pixel loss at some point. I don't use much vector software other than Inkscape and I'm not great with it except for making labels.

So basically I am asking what methods have others found useful to do this. I have an idea but if there is a shortcut I'm all ears.

If I was doing everything by hand on paper I would have to make sure I didn't put a mountain where none existed on the other one (world/regional).

[Hai-Etlik]

Somehow I think I am failing to state my question accurately.

Let me try another way:

You are hired to create a world map and several regional maps of said world. Lets say they plan to hang them on their wall. Obviously the regional maps will show more detail than the world map but you still want them to have the same shape and major features.

I guess if it were in vector you can shrink and expand the areas as needed but you still deal with what detail to show or not as well as pixel loss at some point. I don't use much vector software other than Inkscape and I'm not great with it except for making labels.

So basically I am asking what methods have others found useful to do this. I have an idea but if there is a shortcut I'm all ears.

Most GISes have the ability to do various kinds of conditional symbolization based on scale. So you can tell it to do things like, if the scale is smaller than 1:100,000, only display cities with a population of at least 750,000. There are also tools to simplify linestrings and polygons so they are suitable for a particular scale, Inkscape does include a form of this.

[liciobruno]

Most GISes have the ability to do various kinds of conditional symbolization based on scale. So you can tell it to do things like, if the scale is smaller than 1:100,000, only display cities with a population of at least 750,000. There are also tools to simplify linestrings and polygons so they are suitable for a particular scale, Inkscape does include a form of this.

Can you tell us some GIS which is simple to use and open source? I found Landserf, that is very simple, but it is not open source. Thanks.

[Redrobes]

Can you tell us some GIS which is simple to use and open source? I found Landserf, that is very simple, but it is not open source. Thanks.

I have barely used it but QGis is open source free gis app.

[Hai-Etlik]

Can you tell us some GIS which is simple to use and open source? I found Landserf, that is very simple, but it is not open source. Thanks.

QuantumGIS and GRASS are the big names in FOSS desktop GISes, there are also uDig and OpenJUMP which I've heard are somewhat simpler, though I've never used them. For an easy way to install a range of FOSS GIS software on Windows, you might want to look at OSGeo4W.