Have you considered using a different style of roads? Those dashed lines works on overland maps because they're only representative of the feature, but on close-up maps like these, they come out looking a bit out of place. Maybe a dirt brown fill with a small edge fade instead?

When you say "hide all your layers...", do you actually mean layers, or are you talking about the sheets?

Also, hiding the map border (The map border is on the MAP BORDER layer, and the BACKGROUND sheet) can in some cases have unforeseen consequences, because CC3+ uses the map border to calculate the extent of the export. I have seen cases where that resulted in a temporary image ImageMagick couldn't convert in the final step, so please try as roflo1 suggested and do a rectangular section export instead, and see if that gives different results.

Unfortunately no, this command only allows up to 10.

The alternative would be the Symbols in Area command. It doesn't pack symbols tightly the same way, but by experimenting with the random arrangement you may be able to get close. While that command only lets you choose a single symbol, it has the advantage that you can ask it to use all the symbols in the same symbol group as the one you picked, technically allowing for using as many symbols as you want. There is a blog article dealing with setting up a custom symbol group just for this purpose.

I am not sure how images would work. The lines for the original lines are just plain simple lines. The easiest way to deal with them is to open up the symbol catalog for editing (@Symbols\Cosmographer\basesym.FSC), the from symbol manager, clone the symbols, and finally, go in and edit the two clones, using change properties on the lines to change their width. You can then save the symbol catalog with both your new modified copies and the original in them, and you should be able to easily pick from the starmap options which of the two to use.

(I normally don't recommend overwriting the original symbol catalog, but for this case, it may be the simplest, providing you do clone the symbols and don't change the originals. But if you prefer to be safe, either save your modifications under a new name, or make a backup of the original first.)

If you know the name of the fill to change to, the quickest is to use the CHANGEFS command. Type in the command (followed by enter), pick the poly when CC3+ asks for selection, hit D for Do it, and when it asks for the new fill, type in solid white 20 and hit enter. Changing it via the command line do require that you spell the new fill 100% correct though.

Of course, you can also use the more common GUI dialog through :CC2MCHANGE:. If you wish the correct fill style to be pre-filled in this dialog, first use the KEEP (:CC2KEEP:) command on another entity that has the correct fill, and when you then use change properties on the entity you want to change, the fill style you extracted from the other entity is already pre-filled, all you have to do is to check the check box in front to apply it.

You cannot use the commands like that. SELBYP doesn't return entities that can be stored in a variable, all it does is change the selection mode to be by prior instead of the normal selection procedure. Also note that GE doesn't actually store an entity, it stores a set of coordinates where the entity is located, that can be used to grab the entity but it doesn't store the entity itself.

Likewise, RANDOM doesn't have a return value. The command is used very similar to the GV and similar command, i.e. RANDOM varname will cause a random number between 0 and 1 to be stored in varname. You can then manipulate this further.

The SHADEPOLY command also need a second argument for the pitch.

Also be careful with those semi-colons. Commands in CC3+ are executed by using either a new line OR a semicolon. Using both means you are basically creating an empty line, and in CC3+ that means repeat the previous command.

You can find the correct syntax of all the commands in the table in the tome, or in the spreadsheet in @documentation\tome\commands.xlsx

If you have access to Acrobat Professional, it may also be worth trying to feed it through the PDF optimizer, flatten the structure of the file.

Those old PDF's are pretty cool, because they contain actual vector data from CC3+, making them have the same "infinite" zoom capability that the original CC2 map it was made from. But unfortunately, that also means it is highly complex, which is why it probably crashes your readers now.

And every citizen in every city prays it won't decide to come out and play with them.....

The black background usually means that CC3+ cannot find the map file it is trying to load, so it simply uses the defaults (which is a black background). That in itself is nothing to worry about, as the background is controlled on a map by map basis. Everything will be fine when you load or start a new map.

Of course, the example map should have been loaded, so that seems to indicate you didn't get that file installed. Which may or may not indicate that the rest of the addon wasn't installed properly either. Best way to see that is to try to open the symbol catalog manually and see if it exists, and no red crosses in it...

Now, I see it is trying to show the no-SS6 version of the example, since I guess you don't have SS6, and I am guessing someone forgot to include that file in the installer (or gave it the wrong name), and the rest is fine..

Now added to the atlas. Thanks for contributing.