How to display place names for a map?

[Steel General]

I think as long as you pick a legible font, "crowding in" the place/name labels is fine. But having a numbered key or grid system is OK too.

[guyanonymous]

In my core areas, space is too much of a premium to label several of the countries when the entire world is visible (and that's at 20"x30") if I actually want it legible.

I'm thinking of breaking things down to 5 maps - one for each continent.

[Redrobes]

Is this a printed map or something to look at on a monitor or both ? Because readability of print is much better than monitor so you could get small text in there.

[Talroth]

How are you creating your maps, and how are you viewing them?

Personally, I'm a fan of doing over view maps, label the largest and most important cities and regions. Then make sets of sub maps for more detail and avoid crowding. I personally like this as I like detail.

Also, while you might not label the names of towns and villages, I find it useful to at least put a small icon, a circle or square or something simple to mark two or three 'levels' of detail below what you are actually labeling.

[guyanonymous]

Right now it's an overview of the entire world.

I've come (almost) to the conclusion that I'll use sub maps for each continent, and then, following that, for each country itself.

Here's a "scale" pdf of my map. Each 8x11 page will tile with the others to give you "life size". Even at this size, the labeling is a too tight (for me) for several of the small countries.

And to think, I picked the easy world-building project to do first.

[ravells]

There is a good article about it here.

[guyanonymous]

Thank you,

I'll check it out!

[jfrazierjr]

Is this a printed map or something to look at on a monitor or both ? Because readability of print is much better than monitor so you could get small text in there.

As RR says, it also depends on your software and if you are doing monitor or print and if monitor only are you viewing in the software or are you viewing in a browser.

One thing that I REALLY like about Fractal Mapper (and I am sure CC does this also) is that you can set objects to have a zoom level associated so that as you zoom in or out things like labels can be turned off or on. For example... say you have a large label for a nation. As you zoom in and hit a certain level, you turn off the nation label and turn on some of the region labels and perhaps some of the larger city labels. As you zoom in more, you turn off the region labels and turn on even more of the small town labels (and optionally turn on their "icon/marker", etc.