I’ve got this sorted out some more to the point where it’s now truly useful and I’ll send along two inkscape templates for you to tinker with, an inkscape development file within which I illustrate an example to go along with the all important tutorial in which I actually seem to explain what I’m getting at. What was I thinking?

I’m really glad you like the icons, they are based on old 19th century map icons and old map colours. The set is far from complete or finished. However, I’ve added a few more bits of art for your immediate enjoyment.

Greg

Just installed Inkscape and am about to start playing with it. Great icons, Greg – these are truly inspired. Hope to produce something worthy of your work soon.

My plan is to complete the three templates and then work on the hexes to duplicate and snap. I’ve broken things into layers which will be locked, from top down Border Text, Border, Grid (Atlas), border blanking (crops the base hexmap beyond the border), Hexmap Atlas, and finally U Draw. So the layer you’ll draw on is below everything else. The others are locked.

My intention is to subdivide the U Draw layer into sublayers Text, Icons, Terrain Icons, Roads, Rvers, Hex Colours, etc. However, I intend to include a bunch of artwork for the Icons which I haven’t done yet. I’ll probably be using my Gnomeyland artwork as the basis for that due to the fact that I want to avoid any issues and the fact that it’s just plain time to move on – YO!

The good part of all this is it will be vector art. I’ve encountered a little wierdness with the polygon tool so my hexes are not perfectly symetrical. I’ve fudged them a little to fit into a square, and by using snap to nodes, I find that if the square is subdivided into four, the hexes snap perfectly, so that lines overlap rather than adjoin. I’m using metric by the way so the hexes are approximately 1 cm, but the paper size is 11×17. Printed to pdf, or saved to PNG, it should provide very clear output. They look quite good, acceptable to me anyway.

The “icons” will be drawn in a square box or hexes, but I haven’t decided which yet. Hey, aren’t I supposed to be working on my Chimera module?

Greg

I’ve been inspired into making a set of templates in Inkscape 0.46 for these Erin which will allow me to map in my own peculiar mannerisms, more “drawn” than plug in. I’ve got the hexes snapping together nicely so far.