The communities thoughts on software-assistance in map design

[Hai-Etlik]

This is just a specialised and somewhat esoteric map symbolizer. That's not all that different from how the majority of real maps are made. You set up the styling rules, toss in some data, and out comes a mp. Then you change the data and get a map of somewhere else that exactly matches the style of the first. My day job is working on a piece of software that does this sort of thing (along with a lot of other stuff). I've even helped design a language for describing the style rules (It's called YSLD http://boundlessgeo.com/2014/12/ysld/)

The skill and creativity is in designing a good set of style rules that convey the information you want in a clear, concise, and attractive way across all of the potential data the style might be applied to.

[3l3phant]

YSLD is interesting (I'm more experienced as a geek than a cartographer) and I've been interested in QGIS for quite some time now but haven't gotten around to really learning much about it. That may need to change in the near future