These tools use a raster image for their fill, which is just a 1-pixel image with either a black and white pixel. This image is set up with built-in transparency. You'll find these fills in the fills list as Solid 10, Solid 20, ... Solid 90 and Solid White 10, ... Solid White 90, where the number indicates the opacity (10 is almost fully transparent, 90 is almost fully opaque).

When overlaid other elements in the map, the pixels below are mixed with that fill according to the transparency level of the fill, thereby serving to lighten or darken whatever they overlay.

Looks good. The main thing that seems to be missing are effects. Especially the piers look very flat on the water without some kind of shadows and/or glows or bevels to help elevate them a bit.

Well, as the Tome itself states in the introduction, it is written for intermediate to advanced users. It does assume some knowledge of the basics of cc3+, and relies on the user having worked through the tutorials in the manual first, and probably worked a bit on their own before diving into the Tome.

Also understand that the tutorial is written for that particular map in mind, it is extremely difficult to figure out all the ways a user may want to do things differente from the tutorial and reference those, that would also make the tutorial extremely bloated. The goal of the tutorial is to teach the user various techniques based on the requirements for that map.

So, I put together a video showing how I prepare atlas maps and discuss some of my tools. It is a bit on the longish side, but I suppose it could be interesting for some.

The sound is not perfect unfortunately, something up with my mic config. I'll get that sorted for my next video, but it is still fully watchable.

Note that the reason Sue's map was wrongly scaled here was that she though the city was in metric scale, which is quite understandable because it is actually started on a metric template, but the sizes of all buildings and symbols used are in imperial, something I hadn't noticed before the contest.

The symbol won't update in the symbol catalog when you edit the symbol in the map. Editing a symbol in the map won't affect the global symbol catalog.

You can click the :ICON_DRAWING: button to have the symbol catalog show the symbols in the current map.

(Also keep in mind the symbol catalog window does not react to changes dynamically, it only updates when you manually force it to, such as by re-loading the symbol catalog or toggling symbols in map.)