Hi everyone! This is my first time here. Can anyone help me with Inkscape's topology. How can I fill those polygons with a color with the minimum cuantity of paths? I want to keep it topologically correct and as simple as posible.

Thanks

Trace every shape with the bezier tool and snapping, then giving it a fill ?

But the fill has another path around it. That attachment is a simple shape, but imagine a complex map with countour lines, if every hypsometric level is a independent shape, different from every countour line, the paths will be duplicated, making the file huge.

pyrvs wrote:But the fill has another path around it.

Remove the stroke.

That attachment is a simple shape, but imagine a complex map with countour lines, if every hypsometric level is a independent shape, different from every countour line, the paths will be duplicated, making the file huge.

It sounds like you want to trace a kind of map and get very precise path outlines. Inkscape's trace engine cant do that at the moment.

Whether you manually create closed paths to enable Inkscape to use a regular fill, or whether you use the Paint Bucket to fill the area (which creates another path) you still end up with approx 2 paths for each area. There's just no way around it.

But here's one way you might be able to manage it. Use Layers. You can have your original drawing on one layer, and put all the new paths with color in a layer above. You can hide one layer while you work on another. Although I realize there will be times when both layers neeed to be visible. But maybe you could break the image up into sections? I don't know how large it is, but if you looked at it as having 5 major sections, and place them on separate layers, you can have 80% of the image hidden, while working on 1 section

If precision is an issue, you'll want to use the Pen/Bezier tool, together with snapping. The Paint Bucket tool, which at times can be a quick shortcut, provides nothing close to accuracy, let alone precision.

Ok, thanks for the quick responses! I thought you could use a path for multiple fills and viceversa. I'm familiar with JOSM (Open Street Map), where several polylines can sprout from a single node, and where you make fills by constructing a relation between some of those polylines, so you get no duplicities. I see now that Inkscape can't do that. Woudn't relations be a useful feature to develop in Inkscape?

While they sound interesting, Inkscape is using the web standard SVG to save its files. This ensures maximum compatibility with other programs, but is limited to the features of the SVG file format.