Thanks very much @Loopysue ! Haven't checked back here since I posted due to other things getting in the way this evening. Hadn't realised I'd done a "Ralf" (i.e. found a new bug while simply trying to map)!

@JulianDracos - If you follow my instructions above for now, that should be enough to get Text Along A Curve to function properly again, until whatever's happened in the Update can be fixed formally, whether you're using Update 26 or 27 currently.

Being a cheapskate, I have only the lower-cost PDF Legendary version of Barbarians of..., but like a lot of the simpler-mechanic Sword & Sorcery style RPGs, it looks quite fun (never tried it for real, however). Good to know there are still people prepared to adapt and amend rules-systems this way though. When I began with RPGs (mid-late '70s) that was the norm, though I know that's much less common these days.

There are a lot of handy random name-generators freely available online now. There've been several mentions of some on this Forum over time, so if you get stuck, you might try a search here for those - or simply an ordinary web-search for "random name generators". You'll likely find more than you can possibly use (even if most are ostensibly for fantasy gaming)!

It's something to remember when you make your own drawing tools and name them, not to make the names too long to still read in this dialogue.

So does the silence mean nobody knows ("Will this potentially then create alignment issues for text on strongly-curving arcs? Such as a circle, semi-circle or narrow-end of an ellipse? Or indeed one that curves in different directions (like a long name on a river line, say)?", or is experimentation still underway? Or have I simply misinterpreted what had been said earlier?

Either way, can we PLEASE get the default setting for Text Along A Curve presented so one can actually write text along a curve without worrying that the text will end up inverted, reversed, confused, and probably feeling seasick? The fact the default reverts back to chaos every time I reopen the program is getting REALLY tedious, as I've been using the command a lot lately.

If I need text reversing (can't imagine why, as noted already, but...) or inverting, I can worry about what commands need adjusting on such an occasion. If I have a curved line I want the text to be written along so it can be read the same way up as the rest of the map, I shouldn't have to be worrying about altering the default settings just to achieve that basic operation.

Interesting map.

Like Sue, I wondered about the coastline too. It looked a little like some of the automated random map designs that use a hex-map base to generate their outlines; it seems you'd done the earlier analogue version of that!

The river lines seem a little overwhelming currently, and for a map of this scale, there are probably too many. From how you'd prepared the original hex maps, that's likely unsurprising, as you'd be drawing each in far more detail than a continental map would need.

There's an art to working out what should be preserved when scaling-out like this, from a regional/local level to a continent-sized area, which generally devolves to settling on those few, major features to keep, and greatly increasing the smoothing of elements such as coasts and river lines. Not often easy to decide, however, particularly when you're heavily-invested in each little detail!

The relative sparsity of the mountains and forests seems about right for this mapping-scale by contrast, and is perhaps what leads to the rivers and coasts not looking quite right.

Maybe add a few names for some of the larger inland seas?

Both look good to me!

Some of the expanses of farmland look like scaled skin - civilisation built on the back of a dragon, perhaps? 😉🐉

You could perhaps fade-out the outer edges of the whole, maybe using an overlay sheet with a large Edge Fade Inner Effect, to get away from the "edge of the world" look of too much in the map's centre compared to the periphery.

Text in banners might be too elaborate for this map; probably worth trying just text at first (you can always add banners later if that still seems needed).

If you're going for a more natural growth look, it may be better to use smoother lines for the tunnels and caves. The fractal edges right now is what made me assume they'd been tunneled in.

And don't forget the third dimension - no reason that couldn't be an ascending, or descending (or both in different places), spiral, rather than one on a more or less single horizontal plane.

Was it the Glow Effect, or the Outer Glow one, you were using? Outer Glow does need more work to stop it looking like a solid mass outside the highlighted object sometimes, as there are more elements of it you can adjust. Glow usually works quite well without having to do this, particularly for circular objects (Glow doesn't work so well for the corners of angular objects however; Outer Glow is much better for those).

You might want to think of swapping the locations for the Red Sun and Georgia systems, as the red coloration isn't so easy to see against the darker sky background. The yellow for the Georgia system should still be fine against the darker area where Red Sun is currently.

I've not done much with Cartographer, so I hadn't realised there'd be such an issue with adding a glow to the symbols. There is a small glow built-in to the star symbols, but I agree a larger glow is really needed to show clearly what the object is when you're viewing the map at a distance.

The Red Sun system does look a little better.

If you still want to swap the two systems, I think you will be better moving the systems manually.

You could use rotate, providing you know the exact centre of the main orbit on which both systems lie, but this will also invert everything in the process.

Mirror copy would keep all the orbits and objects in their same relative positions once swapped to the opposite side of the orbit (don't do this on the labels though), but you would need to drawn the mirror line very precisely at an angle to accomplish this, AND mirror copy will force everything onto one Sheet if it wasn't to begin with. Plus you couldn't swap the two systems in one command, so one would overlap the other after the move (unless one set is on a different Layer, which you could hide before-hand).

Maybe mirroring or rotating the background star image would work instead? It would certainly be a simpler operation!