People,
I use Xara a lot and love it. About a week ago I wanted to fill in the squareish shapes created when you draw a series of roughly horizontal lines and then draw a series of roughly vertical ones across them. The sort of thing that results in a quilt pattern or a chess board. Now I had not had occasion to use Xaras combine and slice functions much in the past and I found it very confusing and indeed at times a PITB. Nevertheless after persevering and some help from past forum threads I got what I wanted.
It took a lot of time though and I did think that it would be nice to have a fill control that worked with vector lines in a more intuitive manner, much as do the fill operations in raster programs. Sweet dreams I thought.

The present thread is talking about just such a thing but people seem a bit confused on the raster/vector situation. And since I follow the Inkscape forum as well as use Inkscape I thought I could just clarify a little bit with respect to fill operation.

1. Inkscape is a vector based program.
2. Its fill function works on vector lines. Ie. If you draw a square with four crossing vector lines you simply go into the square and flood fill it with colour. Similarly with more complex drawings. Just fill each section. It is so simple that I am blown away by it.
3. Its fill function also works on imported raster files. For example I just pulled in a photograph of a railway station and zoomed in on a section of sky between some struts and filled it with yellow.

This is not something Inkscape might do in version 0.46, it is here and now in the current nightly builds. I just brought down the Win version from 4th April and it worked. The 0.45 versions that people have mentioned are the current stable versions and are out of date in respect of fill.

I do not have time to work up some examples at present, and in any case I want to explore the limits of the controls, but will try and do so next week if someone does not beat me to it.

Erik