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A couple of years ago I rendered some maps in QGIS using OpenStreetMap data.

It was a complicated beast of functionality but if you learn the right 2 % of buttons it becomes a very competent tool for creating exactly the maps you need. It gives you the tools to show exactly the terrain features you care about (rivers, roads, streets, highways, trails, forests, buildings, railways, etc.) and you can choose to style them however you want.

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Total agreement on QGIS: seems daunting at first, but if you know exactly what you want you can usually get there in half an hour.

I have been using this a lot for scout activities and keep grandma-style notes of which buttons to push for a particular use-case. So awesome to be able to do things like contour-only maps and atlas along a route.

For any Danes around: There is an official plugin from "Kortforsyningen" for QGIS, allowing you to pull all the high-quality public data directly into your maps.

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