Discussion: flood fill an area pattern in ocad?

Let's say you draft your whole ISSOM map except the pavement on your college campus. Is there a trick or shortcut to filling "the rest" of the map with an area symbol, kind of like flood fill??

Wouldn't that be nice!

Nope - the closest it gets is the ctrl-click to follow an existing shape. If you spend the time early on joining up all your pavement edge lines as much as possible then filling in the colours gets a lot easier.

Couldn't you create a new area symbol (or duplicate an existing one), assign it a new color and put that color at the bottom of the color table giving it the lowest overlap precedence, then just draw a polygon around your map with that symbol? Maybe that's not what you are trying to do...

Has anyone here used the O-scape plug-in for Inkscape? (I haven't, surprisingly)

I know Inkscape has a flood fill feature, so perhaps O-scape does, too?

Use Ghettocad and finger paint in the fill.

eddie has got it. Exactly what I was going to suggest.

What about making another copy of the map. Delete all the point and linear features. Change all other features to the same area symbol. Merge them all. Then change it to pavement outline. Then tweak that to make an inverted shape that basically has the same boundaries, fill it with pavement, and copy it back to the original file??

You can fill pavement edges (or anything else that may bound your pavement) with pavement. For each such filling that you do, the pavement may wind up on the wrong side of the edge in some or all places. But you can add points along the final long straight edge and drag those to the proper side. Overlap the areas thus created, and iif you want, you can merge them. If that doesn't make sense, let me know and I'll provide some illustrations.

I think eddie's suggestion will work fine provided you don't have any areas that you want to appear white. If you have limited white areas, you can cut holes in your big paved area.

JJ that makes sense. Thanks all for your help

I personally would caution against Eddie's suggestion. It would certainly work but inheriting a map like that to update it or make changes is a pain as you try and struggle to figure out what the heck the original mapper was doing and how to get it to do what you want it to do.

JJ's method combined with the ctrl-click works well.

Even better than ctrl-click: if you have drawn the complete border of an object you can just copy the border object, paste it then convert the second object from the outline symbol to the area fill symbol.

In that case you could just use the 'fill or make border' button.