3 replies to this topic

[Cctoide]

Has anyone done political vector maps with Adobe Illustrator with country tints, and if so, how did you separate the countries so you could give them their own color?

Vectors seem to have a problem with this - each country object you have has to copy its neighbors' borders, otherwise it's not a closed shape. I'm not necessarily working with exported data from another application but rather outlines I drew myself. The Knife tool seems it would come in handy for this, but it doesn't slice an object in two, and I don't see of a way to use, say, a path to bisect another object.

[Hans van der Maarel]

Has anyone done political vector maps with Adobe Illustrator with country tints, and if so, how did you separate the countries so you could give them their own color?

Vectors seem to have a problem with this - each country object you have has to copy its neighbors' borders, otherwise it's not a closed shape. I'm not necessarily working with exported data from another application but rather outlines I drew myself. The Knife tool seems it would come in handy for this, but it doesn't slice an object in two, and I don't see of a way to use, say, a path to bisect another object.

If you draw single borders (and make sure they enclose areas), there's a Pathfinder tool that can create separate areas from that.

Or... save yourself a lot of trouble and import some existing data

[Adam Wilbert]

depending on what version of illustrator you're using, the Live Paint feature in CS3 (and CS2?) would probably do what you need, without having to have a closed polygon for each country. With it, any shape that appears closed (and there are gap tolerances for this too) can be filled in, even if the linework is from different shapes.

[rudy]

depending on what version of illustrator you're using, the Live Paint feature in CS3 (and CS2?) would probably do what you need, without having to have a closed polygon for each country. With it, any shape that appears closed (and there are gap tolerances for this too) can be filled in, even if the linework is from different shapes.

Cool! I'll have to try that.