dnd mapper trying digital approach

[Hai-Etlik]

Thanks again for continuing to answer.

I want to measure "approximate" distances on the world map. For example something like distance from Hawaii to Oregon, or Maine. Or Oregon to Alaska. It would be nice to know the distance rounded-off to the nearest 100-miles. Does not need to be more accurate than 100 miles, at world scale.

I want to measure somewhat more accurately on the Continent, region, state, and city-state scale. I probably want to overlay a hex-map grid on the state and city-state scales. These distances will be used to measure overland travel -- for example, 6 days ride by horse, or 12 days walking, or how-many-miles.

I'm afraid it's going to be significantly worse accuracy than that.

Fractal Terrains (world software from profantasy) has distance measuring tool, that even works on the globe. You may not know it has this feature. I do not know if the feature is accurate but it seems reasonable enough. It works to measure even on Orthographic map. It actually draws a curved line on the apparent globe surface indicating the start-point and end-point of a distance route. I understand this measuring may not normally be possible on Orthographic, but remember FT knows the mathamatical layout of the world in many different projections.

Yes, that sounds like they are using spherical distance calculations in the background so it should be reasonably accurate. The problem I was talking about is if you try to measure a straight line distance on the map itself and then use that.

In the profantasy software line, they expect you to export to CC3 (Campaign Cartographer, $40) to add Cities, Borders, Roads, and Touchup. I have not found a free demo of CC3 so I have not tested how this works & would like to hear from Cartographers on this site who used the profantasy software to do this. Because I don't have the CC3 instructions, I don't know what settings they recommend for exporting FT to CC3. And I don't know what projection and scale the CC3 map would be (?).

Presumably whatever they were when you exported from Fractal Terrains.

From what Hai-Etlik said, a possibly next step is exporting Equirectangular from FT, import to G.Projector to "pretty up". So would G Projector give me nice features for adding cities and borders and roads? I will look into it.

No, G.Projector can only reproject and add a graticule. That's it. I meant you could add any features you wanted to the equirectangular map using Fractal Terrains, or a conventional image editor, then run it through G.Projector to get it into the projection you want for the final map, then load it into an image editor again (CC, Photoshop, Illustrator, whatever) and draw your finished map on top of it.