Trouble with scale

[ARKatz]

I've long been an admirer of maps and the many skilled cartographers on this website. I myself have barely dabbled, reading what I can and using my expertise in graphic design to sketch out some basic maps. I've been sitting on a finished map for a series of books for a while. I have a scale all set up, but with the map designed 180" x 110" (I'm ambitious), it's a right pain to grid the whole thing out and count the squares one by one to measure out the square miles of landmasses, islands, seas, etc.

In my naivety, I have to assume there is an easier way. Is there any program in existence that I could import an image into, set a scale and certain parameters, and have it do the grunt work for me? Or have I set myself a passion project with no foreseeable end?

Thank you so much, and I hope to be able to share my work with everyone very soon!

[Gamerprinter]

Maybe there is. If using an image editor you could place a repeating texture fill for a grid. I use Xara Designer Pro, a vector drawing program, and I design my maps with a visible grid of dots showing the inch marks, so I design already knowing the scale (and can see it as I design) ahead of time. At completion, I hand place the grid, one line at at time. Once created I place it on the appropriate layer. For regional maps, its the top layer, for encounter scale maps, its on the ground/floor beneath furnishings, plants, trees, etc.

[Redrobes]

Put it into any paint package and scale a copy of the image to something which makes more sense in the real world. I dont understand your 180 x 110 (inches of paper ?) bit but lets say the map is 180 miles by 110 miles real world. Scale the map to 1800 x 1100 pixels and then just look at the cursor position and read off the position and divide that by 10 for positions and lengths etc.

If you want a quick way to measure the area of an irregular shape like a country then take a copy of the image, make it black and white only (no shades of grey - use contrast 100%) and set it up so the country is white and the rest of the image is black. Now using the histogram function you get an image package like Gimp to just read off the number of pixels of black and white and it usually even gives you a percentage of the image white. Now if you know the pixel size was that 1800x1100 and say 90,000 pixels were white then you know that equates to 0.1x0.1*90000 = 900 square miles. Or to say that another way, if you had 180x110 miles = 19800 square miles for the whole image, if Gimp says that histogram is 3% white then you have 0.03*19800 = 594 square miles.

Hope that helps. RobA and I worked out the magic histogram method between us a few years back so shared kudos to him for this one.

[ChickPea]

That's a neat trick with the histogram!

[johnvanvliet]

mmps can
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~arcus/mmps/

an example in this post
https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...l=1#post310529

or Qgis using gdal to add a grid