On 9/14/05, Hibbs, Phil <phil.hibbs@...926...> wrote:
Would you want it to follow invisible edges? I commented on the feature request, but someone else said that it would be better to rasterize the image, trace the shape, and then vectorize the result. I think this is a mistake, it should follow edges exactly. If there are hidden edges then this can be overcome by creating a number of shapes and welding them together.
It was me who said it's much better to make this tool act as the corresponding tool in bitmap editors. Otherwise, why bother? Filling is a visual concept, and it should behave visually, e.g. run into white areas of bitmaps and gradients, ignore invisible lines, etc. Just fill what is _seen_ as continuous, without taking into account the vector invisibles. If you want filling to stop at some line, just make that line visible temporarily. Another advantage is that this will allow changing the filling threshold, whereas a "vector fill" will always be strictly binary. In short, my approach would provide some new and otherwise unachievable capabilities, whereas a "vector fill" will be simply a shortcut for a sequence of boolean ops.