Oh to be proficient in metapost! Martin, that may be the tip I have been looking for. I will experiment with this sometime. It also depends on how various pdf readers and printer drivers interpret the different approaches. I presume your recommendation applies to areas defined using drawing/clipping to the path, and not areas defined using patterns? And is it better to use drawoptions(); or thdrawoptions(); ? Bruce -----Original Message----- From: therion-bounces@speleo.sk [mailto:therion-bounces@speleo.sk] On Behalf Of Martin Budaj Sent: Tuesday, 6 November 2012 6:39 a.m. To: List for Therion users Subject: Re: [Therion] How to avoid that symbol-colour area blocks fills the blocks with chosen color Another solution is to leave "thclean qq" on its original position and change clip tmp_pic to p; draw tmp_pic; to clip tmp_pic to p; drawoptions(); draw tmp_pic; at the end of the macro definition. This approach preserves filling the blocks with a background colour. I think all built-in symbols should be updated in this way. Martin