Inkscape: Creating objects that share bordering path parts

Question

I want to create maps with inkscape and to have an object for each country.

I want to draw borders between countries only once and have this part of a path duplicated and assigned to the bordering countries.

E.g. I want to draw the border between France and Spain only once and have it assigned to both countries.

I know that I can simply draw each border as a separate path, cut out a part or use the whole path, copy it and merge each copy with the rest of the respective country's outline.

Is there a better approach to the problem?

Answer 1

SVG (not just inkscape) is not well adapted to tesselations.

What I would do:

• Have one "boundaries" layer in which I draw just once each boundary/sea shore portion.
• Each time that you have drawn the whole outline of a country/waterbody, select them, duplicate them CTRL-D, combine them CTRL-K and move them to a separate layer SHIFT-PgDn (e.g.).

Of course, any subsequent change of a boundary will need to be reflected in the adjacent countries by re-doing the above step, but this way you keep the "source" layer and build the "country" layer separately.

If you want to automate this, this is probably doable with a python extension, the first step for this is to label each portion with the names of the nearby entities, e.g. "France,Spain".