Unfortunately, you can't make the background transparent, you'll have to do that in post-processing in another program. And if you plan to do that, your anti-alias should be off, since antialiasing is the sworn enemy of proper background removal. Also, antialiasing off will let the map export faster.

If you are going to convert it to a jpg anyway, you shouldn't worry about the file size of the png though, since that won't really matter in the end anyway. png's are always quite a bit larger than jpeg's.

The scale symbols are always made to be placed with scale factor 1.0, because it is important to get those absolutely correct, and using a factor of 1.0 makes the precision perfect.

Most other symbols are designed for an imperial scale, and are then simply scaled down when used in metric maps through the default symbol scale for the map.

Yea, basically the same as I foun, just about any solid entity will work, but the entity have to be within view, so since exports are done in multiple passes, you won't necessarily need one line per symbol, but there must be one within view for each segment of the export.

One thing I didn't try yet, but which may work is just making that part of the symbol. A symbol can contain entities in addition to the image. Of course, those entities would be part of the symbol and get the same effects.

I've notified the developer, maybe he can give some more insight in exactly what is happening here.

Wow, that's a great first map. I hope you stick around the forum and make more maps.

Make sure that your line style is NOT set to 'Scale to fit ends' because that will actually do some undesirable scaling to the pattern to make a whole number of repeats for within the line. Once this is off, those issues should be mostly gone. Additionally, don't let your lines be scaled in 'paper scale', since that causes them to be different on export from what you see on screen.