Alright, update time! Starting off simple, the Sol Sector seemed like the right place to begin. Also, I'd like to present what I'm doing more as a beta offering so you guys and gals can scrutinize my style and choices. After all, the attempt is to reconstruct it as faithfully as possible for the wiki, so feel free to spot obvious errors, offer corrective ideas, and chime in on what you think.
I've decided to hold off on the nebulae coloring, as I don't want there to be oddities between shades and thickness that are noticeable by quadrant squares. I'll do that job when the map is all pieced together. The same goes for jump lanes that cross sector borders, I'd like them to line up without a shift due to placement and the map's own weird warping.
Out of all the fonts I have and researched, I could not find the exact matches for the lettering on the map, so I've compromised on what looks close enough and what reads clearly. I'm using Microsoft YaHei Bold at about 108 (for this map size) for the sector name and the system names, while switching over to Trebuchet Bold 40 for the quadrant names. With the quadrant names, it does seem very obvious whoever put it together is using some of the same techniques I'm using to reconstruct it, as I gotta compress the names horizontally to get them to fit just about the size they are on the original. I've also decided that only the sector name will have a slant, about 5 degrees, as the rest of the text seems slanted only by virtue of the Akwende Projection perspective.
I think the system icons are about as close to what they're supposed to be (on a square map presentation), as well as round and shiny. I gave them a subtle little shadow that will be more visible when the nebulae are recolored to make them pop out, but you can make them out in relation to the jump lines. The jump lines themselves have a little equal color glow around them to soften out the otherwise hard edges, which may or may not cause a little discoloration with the colored nebulae. I'll have to see when I get to the finished product.
The background stars are going to be interesting, well, interesting enough to probably cause me to seethe with obsessive, determined anger to get them to look right and work with the rest of the map. Considering there really isn't any available information on what they really are, I've done as best as I can to keep them scaled properly while being visible enough to actually be a pronounced part of the map. I suspect the background stars might be a subject of discussion, though I won't spend too much time thinking about them now, I've got maps to reconstruct.
Probably the biggest thing you'll notice as far as errors on the original is the misaligned jump lines to Cygnus. The distortion and copy error almost makes it seem Proxima Centauri jumps straight to Frase, and the jump lines from the southwest stop just before Cygnus. Additionally, E-Eridani seems to be either misspelled on the WCP final and preview maps, or it has been misspelled as E-Erandi on the rest of the CIC site. For now I'm using the map's spelling, but if it is, in fact, the map's error I'll change it to the correct one.
Without any more delay, here are the reconstructed version and the original for you to compare.
