New to Digital Cartography? Software General Information

[RobA]

While I love Inkscape and use it for a good many things, especially drawing elements, etc. It really bogs down with large images...

Give it a try, as it is free, but don't hold your breath

-Rob A>

[The Good Doctor]

Thanks thus far for the comments. I want something that will handle large images in vector format. The 120 pages is just for the 2 continents, and I've been planning for many years now to rebuild the northern arctic continent (destroyed in a deity war).

I have toyed with the idea of breaking things down into smaller sections. But Freehand offered the promise of being able to handle multiple pages. I am willing to save my $$ and buy Freehand 10 (I'm returning to school in next few months). But I want to know if Illustrator is capable of handling that many pages together? What would be really nice is if I could have the map information printed on a header or sidebar, but like the hot links to other maps, that's another "wanna." Can Illustrator handle that many pages, or should I go with Freehand X (10)?

I am seriously thinking of getting CC3 to handle the in-depth maps. Over the years, I've done about 30 or so hand drawn things, but would like to digitize them and clean them up. For the price, it would allow me to at least do the smaller projects.

Layering and such isn't a big concept for me. Layers are like styles in word processing. Add on it, and it affects the whole map; disable/hide it, and it's gone, all at once. Allows you to customize the maps for players to show political boundaries only, trade routes for merchant parties, etc. And I like Freehand's cloning, and some of the transform features.

I love maps. Did anyone else spend grade school free time tracing maps of other countries? Guilty.

Thanks again for the comments. I look forward to other input.

[hunab.cu]

I am a fanatic of the GIMP for raster editing; for vectors I used Inkscape, and recently I started to experiment with Xara Xtreme.

My favourite method of work is to doodle, doodle, doodle until there's something sensible on the paper; then I scan it and do all the further editing on computer, with previously listed software.

Though it's my preferred method of work, I love to experiment and test new software, plainly graphical as well as map-specific.