Draw the map in illustrator.
Draw the river as a stroke, outline it, draw the river growing as a polygon and compound them.
Or leave them as to objects...

What Allimac said.
Usually what I do (I love making maps) is draw the rough basis as a stroke, then duplicate the layer just to make sure, outline the stroke and manually edit the outlines (because depending on map style, a river especially might actually look better when it's not "mathematically correctly" growing in width).
But yeah, definitely do it in Illustrator. Hell, you could even do it in FontLab. ;-)

you could even do it in FontLab.

I've never bothered purchasing Illustrator, because I don't usually do the kind of work for which it would be useful. But very occasionally I do have a need to create a vector graphic. This is how my wife's wedding ring came to be designed in FontLab :)

Use illustrator you have way more options then indesign, fontlab, and, photoshop.
Object->Path->Outline stroke

Guerrizmo+Design
No man is an island unto himself_John Donne

This is the only kind of river you can get in InDesign :)

I thought it might be better to use Illustrator. I've only played with it a few times years ago and couldn't get tot grips with it. I need to get over that and download a trial of Illustrator I guess.

I used InDesign to make a street map of central Bangkok this week (will post if anyone's interested) and liked the result so thought it could be ok to try rivers with it too.

Not sure Fontlab will solve the problem as I need to design the river around the non-vector parts of the map.

Thanks for the tips, will play with it and post what happens.

That is clever typography! I wonder how that would be set up in InDesign...can't be columns, just manual spacing I guess. Nice.

Ben: It's just a simple text wrap applied to a shape that I put here to mimic the appearance of typographic "rivers" — unwanted gaps running through a block of text.
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Personal Art and Design Portal of Ivan Gulkov
www.ivangdesign.com

Ivan: FWIW, the same trick can (more or less) be pulled without leaving Word...

Leaving word? I don't even have it installed :)
_____________________________________________
Personal Art and Design Portal of Ivan Gulkov
www.ivangdesign.com

LOL! What luxury...

Why not just DRAW the river with the pen tool, instead of fiddling around with strokes?

Strokes are a pain in the ass, they are unreliable. Just trace the contours of the river with the pen tool, then remove any strokes and fill the shape with a solid color?

"Why not just DRAW the river with the pen tool"
?
I meant draw it, with the pen tool; just as one fat line. Then expand the stroke so you get contours, and fiddle with those. Of course you can just draw the individual contours to begin with; I've found I'm much faster the other way.

>Why not just DRAW the river with the pen tool

That's what I had done at first but it looked really uneven so I wondered if there was a way to have a stroke that fattened, so you could still edit the course of the river without having to reposition all the nodes you'd get with an outline.

Draw a very long and thin triangle. Drag onto the Brushes panel -- Illy wants to know what type of brush it will be; select "New Art Brush".
Draw your river as a single smooth line and apply the brush.

Yes, making a brush would be the way to create a thin-to-thick stroke.

> I meant draw it, with the pen tool; just as one fat line. Then expand the stroke so you get contours, and fiddle with those. Of course you can just draw the individual contours to begin with; I’ve found I’m much faster the other way.

Yes, it's faster. I use that method too from time to time. Although most of the things I trace I just do the contours at once.

> That’s what I had done at first but it looked really uneven so I wondered if there was a way to have a stroke that fattened, so you could still edit the course of the river without having to reposition all the nodes you’d get with an outline.

Well, fair enough. Maybe an example image would have been convenient, so we know what exactly you are trying to achieve. :)