(py)cairo - fill

Question

is there a way to fill everything outside of a closed path (polygon)?

Background: I'd like to render some maps with coastlines - so sometimes I need to fill the sea with blue color, so I thought it would be the easiest and in my situation the most efficient to fill everything outside of this coastline polygon with blue color.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

You can add a rectangle covering the whole drawing area to your coastline path and set the fill rule to cairo.FILL_RULE_EVEN_ODD. Calling fill() after this fills the area outside your original path. (If you choose the correct orientation for your rectangle you can skip setting the fill rule.)