Doing it once or twice, that's true (and I've done it several times now). But doing it with larger maps, doing it for all provincial ridings in Canada and colouring in a finished map according to results are all things that I think lend themselves well to an automated process. And yes, I would quite...

My ultimate goal is to have a blank map of the electoral districts standing by, then immediately after an election be able to generate a list of the results by riding from elections Canada or wherever and then run a script that colours in each riding according to which party one it and by what perce...

Right I've used the XML view a little and am aware of the ability to search and replace in it. Like you say, that alone is not really going to do what I want... The maps I'd like to use this on in the future range, from perhaps 20 polygons for a city or province map to hundreds for the federal elect...

Well the people on the jabber channel didn't seem to know either (one person suggested I do it all in the XML file rather than inkscape itself, but I don't know enough to do that either). So if anyone has any ideas on how to do this, please let me know, otherwise I guess I'm gonna have to give up on...

Could you not mirror the text (both horizontally and vertically) and then put it along the path? You would have to convert the text to a path and then use the Effects -> Generate from path -> Pattern along path. I've just tried it and if I understand your question correctly it does what you want.

Never mind I found it:

http://www.inkscape.org/discussion.php

Ah ok, thanks a lot, sorry to be a total Newbie but what/where is the Jabber room exactly?

Hello, I've been using Inkscape to make various maps for a while now. Specifically I've been making electoral district maps to illustrate the boundaries of various Canadian ridings. I do this by tracing out a raster image, giving each riding a polygon. I was hoping for two things: first to be able t...