[Inkscape] Country shade borders

[mr_john]

Hello, i'm in trouble trying to make some shades surrounding my country borders. It should look like this:

erferfer.png
wedwe.png

I'm doing in Inkscape, so there's a tool inset, that makes indent and saves the shape. But the indent is fixed and there is a blank space between to borders then. So i tried to use dynamic offset, but along my shape there appears white spaces, like shape is breaking. Another method i used is to create thick 30% transparent line under original one, but it's impossible to paint one line in two different colors.

My question is: how people make these nice borders?

Original pics:
https://fennomanic.deviantart.com/art/Tiberic-Republic-733227066
https://nanwe01.deviantart.com/art/MotM-1-The-Italian-Campaign-of-1853-54-384918171

[Falconius]

Maybe by converting lines to shapes? I don't know when I did it in Inkscape they basically overlapped, but it wasn't particularly noticeable. So you could try using colours with no transparency and try and work it out so that their overlapping looks equal. What I think is most likely though is that they did it in a raster program, which would be fairly simple in comparison I'd think. In a raster program: Starting with countries that are solid colours you do a magic wand select get the country shape separate the country out to its own layer, make a mask for that country, then reselect the country and in GIMP at least there is an option to make a selection from the border of the selection, so choose how many pixels wide you want it then fill that selections with a darker colour (or make a new layer attach the mask you made and fill it for use with a layer modifier like multiply). I haven't used GIMP in so long it's not even installed so that's about as detailed as I can get. I'm sure others around here can give better instructions.

[ChickPea]

I did a tiny little tutorial on another site that sorta relates to this. Basically, duplicate your land shape and give the duplicate a stroke that's twice as big as you need. Half the stroke will be inside the land shape, and half outside. Lower this layer with the stroke below the original land shape then, with both selected, go to Object/Clip/Set. This will hide the stroke that extends beyond the edges. If you want a dashed stroke too, make another duplicate of the original shape, raise it to the top, and give it a stroke as normal.

I made a little pic previously, although it was more about giving blurred border, but the principal is the same. Hope it helps.

TDYXz.png

[mr_john]

Maybe by converting lines to shapes?

They are shapes already

What I think is most likely though is that they did it in a raster program, which would be fairly simple in comparison I'd think.

No, it was in Inkscape, so i need tutorial for Inkscape.

I made a little pic previously, although it was more about giving blurred border, but the principal is the same. Hope it helps.

Thanks a lot, it works. But i should to test it on my map.

[Hai-Etlik]

Add a new filter effect.

Add a new "Morphology" node, connect it to the "Source Alpha" (The transparancy of the object) and set the mode to "Erode" and set the radius to however thick you want the tint.

Add a "Composite" node and connect the first input to the Morphology node, and the second to the "Source Graphic". Set the mode to "XOR".

This isn't perfect, the tint area will be thicker along diagonals than where it's vertical or horizontal and it assumes you haven't set the alpha of the fill to anything but 1. On the plus side, it's quick to put together once you are familiar with the filter editor, you can copy it to other shapes, and it's non-destructive so you can still edit the shape after applying the effect.

For a nicer looking but less flexible option: duplicate the shape, expand the border of the duplicate to twice the thickness of the tint you want, then convert stroke to path, select both and set clipping path.