It's possible you have an effect in the Whole Drawing category. In this map I have an RGB Matrix Process turning the entire map grey

To check your own map click the Whole Drawing radio button at the top of the effects panel. Anything there will affect the entire map.

Hi Stephen :)

That's a very handy tutorial. Thanks for sharing.

You can attach pdfs and documents to comments in this forum as long as they aren't too large. It may be better to do that in this case so you don't have to maintain the link to your OneDrive into the future.

Do you have a screen shot of the fonts you mean and the bad kerning?

Some fonts don't behave well when placed as curved text.

I believe font kerning is controlled by Windows (even in CC3) based on information built into the font itself. If you are having issues with straight text problems can arise because the font is badly designed - as many of the free ones tend to be these days. In those cases the only solution is to explode the text and move the letters individually wherever it is particularly bad.

I did one like this with a small blur and a transparency effect on the GRID sheet.

It's a 5ft grid with black dashed lines of 0.1 line thickness.

Having a line thickness greater than zero is important in this one case, since for some reason a zero width line doesn't behave as expected.

If you design a dashed line with the correct spacing and scale to use instead of a solid line it should be possible.