Simple climate map - Inkscape or GIMP?

[davoush]

Hello,

I am currently trying to make a simple climate map, much like a koppen climate map where each shaded area represents a climate zone.

I am not quite sure how to go about doing this in Inkscape (which I have been using so far), because each climate area borders onto another, and consequently they share borders or lines which seems quite fiddly in Inkscape (seperate objects, but sharing part of a segment)?

Perhaps Inkscape isn't suitable for this job, and it would just be better to simply shade the areas using GIMP?

Thanks.

[Azélor]

You can't have one area with two climates. I would not recomand using a vector based program for this. I find it easier to paint the colors in Gimp or Photoshop.

[Midgardsormr]

If I am understanding correctly, what you need to do is to use the boolean tools to get shapes that share a complex border by overlapping them. Here's a brief visual tutorial:

tut01.png

tut02.png

In case the contrast is too low to see what I'm selecting there, it's the Division command.

tut03.png

I changed the colors of each object so that you can see how they were divided. They'll initially all be the same color as the bottom object was (blue in this case).

If you want to preserve the entire top shape, you'll have to duplicate it first, and then you'd probably want to send it to the bottom so that the trimmed-off pieces wind up above it. The order in which you select the objects doesn't matter, only the layer order does. Unfortunately, you can only use the command on two objects at a time.