What software can I use to write a world Atlas in/ put one together FOR FREE

[Yomorogoto]

Hi, ive been writing my own story for awhile now and I want to write an Atlas, my issue is I don't know where to start. I'm not sure if this is the best place on the internet to ask but my hope is someone else has had the same problem as mine and can help! Thanks.

[waldronate]

What does an writing an Atlas mean to you? Why do you want such a thing for your story?

[Yomorogoto]

What does an writing an Atlas mean to you? Why do you want such a thing for your story?

It is my life's work, it deserves the highest form of appreciation I can give it. I want this book to be something somebody can pick up and skim through, and not even realize its all fantasy, at least until they get to the maps. I just have absolutely no clue how

[Diamond]

Use a real-world atlas as a template; that's what I'm doing. Every section has a part of a continent, with close up maps of each region. Every map has (or will have) text and insets detailing trade goods and routes, weather, climate, etc.

The guy you really want to talk to is vorropohaiah. He's been working on his conworld atlas for years, and it is something to behold. If you look at his posts in the Finished Maps section, you'll see what I mean.

[Turambar]

Speaking of vorropohaiah, he has an awesome overview of how he acheives his maps on his DA: https://www.deviantart.com/vorropoha...rial-629423829

[Yomorogoto]

vorropohaiah. He's been working on his conworld atlas for years, and it is something to behold. If you look at his posts in the Finished Maps section, you'll see what I mean.

Those are the most beautiful maps I think I've ever seen, this is exactly what I want to do thank you very much, can I like up doot your message or like it anyway?

[Redrobes]

The star under the message box is for liking (or disliking...) any message. Not sure what the dislike actually does tho. When people like your posts it changes the REP score which is shown by the little green boxes under your handle and your rep status changes bands to amusing comments when you get enough rep - hover mouse over the rep boxes.

[Kellerica]

This is not something I'd ever be doing myself, but just my two cents as an illustrator and a graphic designer:

1. For making the actual maps, I'd go for something vector based (I think Vorropaiah actually works with raster graphics, but I'd find it so much easier to do this sort of style in vector!).
Inkscape is free, Affinity Designer is very reasonably priced and excellent, Adobe Illustrator is expensive but generally regarded as the industry standard.
There are also a number of tools for map-making that are used by professional cartographers to map our real world that (as far as I know) can also be used to create fictional maps, but I unfortunately know absolutely nothign about that! The only way I'd know to make atlas like maps is to draw them by hand.
Keep in mind that to save yourself some headache, you'd probably want to create the maps in the kind of image dimensions that correspond with the standard paper sizes wherever you are located, if your end goal is to have your atlas printed.

2. For writing the text, any text editing software will do. Libre Office, Microsoft Word, even something browser based like Google Docs, what have you. Having all of your text in an easy-to-access form, and set up with a proper structure including links and bookmarks for easier navigation will save you a ton of time in the long run.

3. For putting an actual atlas together, you'll want a proper layout program. I believe there is one called Scribus that is completely free, Affinity Publisher is once again your excellent reasonably priced pro option, or Adobe InDesign for the proper pro option with a price tag to match. A program like this will allow you to create the book from the beginning as a book, and the software is optimised to handle large blocks of text and images together in order to create layout that can be exported into a ready-to-print form. While you can add pictures to your texts in a lot of word processors like Microsoft Word, it's really not optimised for that and more often than not ends up being a massive pain in the ass.

So in short: first create the content, and then put it all together in a layout program.