Atlas style test

[Wordman]

Rereading, it looks like you might have the opposite issue of what I described: you have a single coastline object and want to know how to build closed paths for the nations that overlap the coastline.

Do the same thing, sort of in reverse:

Duplicate the coastline in place.

Move the duplicate to a new layer.

Lock everything else.

Assuming you have loose lines that make up your national borders, where these intersect the coastline, use the knife or scissors to cut the coastline.

You will now join this coastline path to the national borders to make a closed path for the nation, then give that path an inner glow.

Important: Each of these loose lines that make up national borders will need to be cloned (and possibly cut), because a line that defines the border between two nations has to be used twice: once for one nation, once for the other. Since a single line can't do that, you need to duplicate the line in place, using one copy for one nation, one for the other.


Note the mental leap that is needed in both of these cases: it is very common in vector drawing for something that looks like one line to actually be several copies of the same line, layered on top of each other.

Another corollary: When doing this kind of work, it is important to get your shapes right at the start. Once you start doing all this line cloning, you really don't want to start editing the path of the line that was cloned.