Secondly: Your map is not truly black. In Gimp, select some black with the Colour Select tool. Now Grow the selection by 1 pixel (Select>Grow). Finally, bucket fill the selection with black. Your map will now be truly black. I didn't get this to work, actually. When I tried to bucket fill the selec...

One: Your objection makes a lot of sense. I wasn't even aware of such an option. I'll see if I can manage to add a layer.

Two: Will give that a shot too!

I scanned a map from a book in .tif format, and modified it quite a lot in GIMP (probably using the wrong tools, as it was my first time using it). Now I would look to vectorize the map, primarily because I want to add text to the picture (specifically, I want to add city names to the filled circles...