What you are experiencing here is an issue nicknamed 'Transparancy Acne (TA)'.

What happens is that as CC3+ stacks sheets on top of each other to generate the final drawing, it needs a way to figure out the Edges of the entities on the sheet just added, so it can apply edge effects. It does this by looking at the difference of the stack of sheets up to an including the prior sheet with the stack of sheets up to and including the current, and then computes the differences.

Unfortunately, when the new sheet have parts that are new, but identical (like you are using the same parchment here, although one is a bit modified, it is still the same parchment) the effects will see those parts (can be as small as a pixel) as holes with edges around and thus apply edge effects.

One way of handling this is to simply stick a sheet with a copy of your entity in between the two sheets with the parchment, and apply the same edge fade to it (maybe even a bit more). Another option which may work in your case is to change the color of your custom fill a little bit, that might be enough to avoid the issue.

Unrelated to this, you'll want to make sure to use relative paths for your fills styles, will save you issues in the future.

While CC3+ can't import data files like CSV or similar,most drawing commands in CC3+ can be executed using a macro command. So if you are capable of writing a translator yourself to turn those CSV data into CC3+ text commands, that command file can be fed into CC3+ to draw things automatically.

More like up early, caught it before going to work :)

For line styles, look at this:

This is true, but remember that if you do it this way, you are giving up a couple of the advantages of symbol catalogs:

• When not importing them, you don't automatically get the 4 resolutions created either. This means CC3+ will use the highest (and only) quality available for your symbols regardless of zoom level. This can impact performance
• You don't get to set useful properties like which sheet they should go on or things like symbol groups or smart symbols.

FT3 have limited support for adding details outside the actual planet. But you can use the Image Overlay. Should be a separate menu for it. From the overlay window, you can create new overlays to use as a drawing surface, and the Overlay Paint tool lets you paint on the overlay.

Not that the size of the overlay is it's resolution, so to avoid having country-sized pixels, you probably need to bump this up a bit from the default selected size of 512x256 when you create a new overlay.

You can export the overlay to an image and work in it in an external editor if you want more advanced painting tools, and then import it back into FT3.