Sarge, when I very first looked at using MapMaker to make AH terrains (must be about a year ago, now, IIRC), I found MapMaker itself to be very easy to use. Just give it some coords and specify how large (in degrees) the area to be covered is, and up comes a pic of the area... adjust as necessary until its just right.
MapMaker does have a function you can select to reduce projection distortion, which works well. It could also emphasise coastlines -which at least made them more cearly visible on the MM display, dunno whether that carried over into AH. Then, you can scale your output, and then output it to the AH terrain editor - which is where I fell flat on my face, though I now suspect I was trying to create terrains larger than the AH editor could handle.
As it happened, the only thing I ended up actually using MM for was to try recreating a LW-style navigation map, from a scan of a photo of part of an original that I had. By saving out the "terrain roughness" data then adding latitude and logitude lines and appropriate notation, it wasn't too bad, though I didnt have access to the right fonts, at the time, sadly.
But I digress... I found MM a breeze compared to the terrain editor, back then. I can't imagine anyone who can handle the TE is going to have much problem with MM. Aside from the ground cover files... rather large, several hundred MB, if you want as much realism as possible in the ground cover in your terrain.
Esme
