Inkscape

how do I erase

Asked by Tappie

How do I erase unwanted parts/ lines etc from a drawing ie where is the eraser.

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Daniel Sachse
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Best Daniel Sachse (antares42) said : 		#1

"Erasers" are common to raster image programs such as Photoshop and Paint.

Inkscape is a vector graphics tool, it works on shapes and lines as objects - so you cannot erase a part of a line or a shape. You could, however, overlay it with some white lines / shapes, thus effectively "erasing" it.

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Tappie (petertapp) said : 		#2

Thanks Daniel Sachse, that solved my question.

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Guillermo Espertino (Gez) (gespertino-gmail) said : 		#3

Daniel, that's not true. We'll have an eraser tool that does that in inkscape 0.47 and boolean substraction operation currently allows to substract parts of a drawing. Even masks and clipping paths may be used for "erasing" parts of the drawing.
Overlaying white shapes is quite messy and uneffective.

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Guillermo Espertino (Gez) (gespertino-gmail) said : 		#4

uneffective = inefficient in my inefficent english. :-)

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Daniel Sachse (antares42) said : 		#5

Ok, you are of course right. I was aware that "white overlay" was a messy solution, but at least it would effectively "clean out everything" so it becomes white.

Thanks for the hint on clipping paths, i found it quite helpful in a figure i made today.

:-)

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LearnDigitalDesign (benjamin-learndigitaldesign) said : 		#6

I keep getting this question over and over again from the members of my site. They say that they can't find the answer, so I googled "Erase in Inkscape" and this was the first thing that came up. So I will post a video that I created here on using the Difference path function to essentially "Erase" in Inkscape.

http://www.learndigitaldesign.com/watchvideo.php?video=34

Hope that this clears up any confusion! Enjoy.