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Difficulty involved with changing map styles?

ArgoForgArgoForg Newcomer
in Mapping with ProFantasy's Software
Sort of a hypothetical question. I''m in the middle of tracing out a nice big world map that I've decided for the time being I'd like to do with the 13th Age Style from Annual 2012. All I really have done is major landmass tracing for the moment.

Suppose I decide afterward that this style just doesn't quite work, based on the available symbols, fills or what-have-you, or I see a newer annual has a style that just screams it works better for my world map. Or say that I want to do up a more zoomed-in regional map in a particular style, say as a treasure map or a local hand-drawn. What sort of difficulty level would changing a map's overall style be? Is there an easy way to do something like that, or is it a pretty involved process?

Just curious.
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Comments

  • MonsenMonsen Administrator 🖼️ 81 images Cartographer
    It is not difficult, but there is a bit of work involved, especially if it is a very detailed map. Changing the styles of landmasses and terrains are quite easy, you can use the 'change like draw tool' on them to instantly convert them to the style of another drawing tool. Most of the work will be replacing the symbols. since there is no one-to-one relationship between symbols in different styles, there is no simple way to replace all. It is easy to replace all instances of one particular symbol in one operation, but you need to repeat it for each symbol. Also, since symbols are not identical (obviously), a symbol that was a good fit in a particular position under one style, might not fit so well under another style, so you'll need to go through the new symbol and move/scale them to fit.

    As for making a more zoomed-in map of another style than the base map, that isn't really any more work at all when compared to making it in the same style, because of the steps you would go through to make it more detailed anyway.
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  • ArgoForgArgoForg Newcomer
    That's really good to hear! And if that's the case, I think I managed to make a pretty solid choice of styles to start-- the 13th Age style seems (at least at first blush) to have a lot of its work done in draw styles (forests, grasslands, etc) as opposed to symbols, so that would seem to translate well.
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  • JimPJimP 🖼️ 280 images Cartographer
    One way I have done this is to do the styles as Monsen said above.

    For the symbols, I just put the new ones on top of the old ones. Then go into the Symbol Manager under the Symbols menu at the top of CC3/CC3+ and delete the old symbols there. That deletes them out of the map.
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