Thanks Abu!

The advantage we modern mappers have is that we can crop the paper size around the map - in the olden days they had to do it the other way round!

Lol, I wasn't implying that you should handwrite the labels too! It is an interesting process and in some ways (at least the way I do it) can actually be quicker than having to do lots of labels on curves. I may ditch the idea as this goes on but was just floating it out there as part of my general process and the sorts of things I think about when drawing maps.