Rather than going through every map style, the faster approach was simply to go through the fonts installed on my computer and then check the ones I liked against the list of approved fonts on the How to Contribute page on the Atlas. I found some that unfortunately are not on the list. Davak is the Wizards of the Coast's official dwarven script, and Rellanic is their elvish script. I believe both are permitted for personal use, but I'm not sure if commercial use is permitted. Tengwar Cursive is Tolkien's elvish script, but in addition to limiting for personal use, the license specifically says that the Tolkien estate must approve for any commercial use. Similarly, there's a Hobbiton font for noncommercial use. Anglo Saxon Runes looks great but is also limited for noncommercial use.

Exploding a font and using them as symbols doesn't change the fact that they still read as a font and therefore are subject to any licensing limitations of the original font.

So a question for Remy:

• If there's a font that's not on the approved list but is available for commercial use, are we allowed to explode them and use them as symbols for Atlas submissions, or would you feel safer only using fonts on that approved list?
• (Moot question if the answer above is "no.") If there's a font that's not on the approved list but is available for noncommercial use only, does the Atlas count as noncommercial use that would allow permit that font to be used as an exploded symbol?

Thank you!

The most time-consuming part was the rivers. It was easy enough to bring them in and use Change Like Draw Tool to convert them to the color cutout rivers. The problem is that when Fractal Terrains exports them, they don't quite run to the oceans properly. I had to move some nodes and draw in some river lines to adjust them (and with over 500 rivers, that took some time). They're still not perfect, but good enough at this scale.

I did move the cliffs down. Thanks! I will have to go back and fix.

It really is beautiful, and I think you've done a masterful job of combining symbols from different styles in ways that compliment each other rather than clashing.

I love how ProFantasy teaches me so much about geography -- the latest being the differences between mesas, buttes, and plateaus. I never took a geology class in school (the town where I lived in for middle school taught it in high school, but then I moved and the town I lived in for high school taught it in middle school). So here's my crash course!

Will there also be cliffs?

This is a clever approach and it looks very nice. I always learn so much when cartographers share their tricks and techniques. Thank you!

Oh, the biggest change is that Ricko's image didn't have sheet effects turned on. I turned them on before making a JPG.

I decided with this one to create JPGs of every step of the way to document the process. I'm only one step two (rivers) and I am already seeking input from the Cartography Hive Mind.

I decided to copy my land over from when I had rendered it in the Fractal Parchment World style last month. That style has the rivers as a cutout, but because Birdseye Continental has the rivers on the same sheet as the oceans, they both have a similar effect in that you can overdraw the rivers past the coastline without it looking funny.

But first I made a copy of that FCW, simplifying it by removing unused sheets and layers, changing the fills to solid colors instead of fills, and then deleting all of the fills. That way when I copy the landmass into new FCW files, it minimizes what it brings in and I won't have a lot of extraneous or confusing fills and sheets and layers that I won't need or want.

Here's what that simplified map looks like:

So I created my new Birdseye Continental map at around 6,000 x 4,000 miles, changed the map size to be 24,960 x 12,495 miles, added the Sea over the green land, and then copied over the land mass from my little template. Changed my land to be a magenta cutout on the Waters (All) sheet. So far, so good.

Then I copied in the rivers and used the Change Like Draw Tool function to change the rivers to the Birdseye Continental style. And that brings up my aesthetic question for all y'all. The rivers in Fractal Parchment Worlds have a default width of 24. (!!!) The default width in Birdseye is 3.

To my mind, 24 is too wide for this map, but what do you think about how 3 looks? Should I bump it up a little or leave as is -- or even delete rivers that would be too small to represent on a 25,000 mile wide map?

For perspective, there is only one river in our world that gets up to 24 miles wide (the Amazon), and only eight that are three or more miles wide: Congo (15), Yangtze (8), Mississippi (7), Paraná (6), Mekong (5), Brahmaputra (4), and Ganges (3).

I know this is supposed to only be the major rivers, and having this many rivers that are 3+ miles wide is rather pushing it. Even so, I'm thinking about (a) leaving them all in, and (b) keeping most of them at 3, while bumping up a few of the really major rivers of this world, but I am very open to everyone's thoughts. I will add this last map to my galleries if you want to be able to zoom in a bit.

Agreed! Thank you for the suggestion. And once I add more vegetation and other features, there won't be so many large stretches of the grass.

There's this button on the right side of the screen.