Hello all, and thanks for the help so far - I have currently ran into another problem. I am trying to edit a map to show various dialect groups, I am doing this by shading selected areas and providing a key. My problem now is, when I draw a path around an area with one 'edge' being the coast, I cannot fill, and I don't want to draw a path on the coast because this is the natural boundary? The map was imported into inkscape for editing and not drawn in inkscape itself.

I'm sure there's an easy solution to this, I thought about trying to trace the coast line and making that path white - but that would result in the shaded area flowing into the sea slightly as it's very difficult to accurately follow the coastline...

Is there any way I could perhaps transform the coastline into a path? The landmass is in colour (and includes white within in), but the 'sea' area is just white if that helps?

Thanks!

Can you post the map, or a similarly formatted one? I can't tell from this post whether you are working off of a raster or vector map format.

What format is the image you imported?
If it's a raster format (JPG, PNG, GIF, and many others) then what's happening is that you're drawing new paths over top of the imported image, rather than editing the image itself. And if it's a raster image, there are 2 ways you could go.

1 - You'll have to somehow draw that border and connect it to the other parts of the border, in order to fill it. You might actually be able to trace it accurately, by zooming in. I do that all the time, and it's really fairly effective. Once you do that, and fill the shape, you could even remove the stroke, rather than color it white. (You have to zoom in enough that you actually see the pixels of the border, then you can use the Pen tool, and place line and nodes along and over the darkest pixels.) If you have a lot of this to do however, it's probably not the best idea.
2 - Convert the image to SVG using Inkscape's Trace Bitmap feature (in the Path menu). So if it's a big map with a lot of coastline, this might be the better option. Because the coastline would actually become a path, and you could use it (or duplicate it) for the border.

If it's already in SVG or other vector format, then you can select the path that defines the coastline, duplicate it, and separate out the portion that you need. Then connect it to the other parts of the border.

We'll be able to give you more details and suggestions, once we know the format of the imported image

Oops, I see that LiquidAsh posted while I was typing.

Thanks for the replies guys, sorry I forgot to mention it is a raster image. Tracing the coastline manually seems like it might work ok as long as I zoom in enough to not miss any parts.

The bucket tool is the best tool to fill areas that are not a single object but appears to be so because it is defined by multiple paths, and having the area be partly defined by a raster element should make no difference, since the bucket tool actually uses an internal rasterization to determine the fill area.

OH, I did not know that!