Forgive me if this has been mentioned, i did do a search in faqs, plus i m not sure that i am using the correct terminology..

In all of the canvases in inkscape there is this rectangle in the middle of the page: 1, I do not know its purpose. 2. I would like to get rid of it.

You can work around this by creating a large white rectangle, however, that doesn't seem intuitive...secondly there must be a reason for this random box in the middle of the page...ha!! I m laughing just thinking about it!

hope u all r enjoying ur evening/day and thx in advance 4 ur response,
Tarek

did another search.......your artwork should fit within that box.......cool!

It is a standard feature of vector graphics software.

In raster graphics you have canvas defined in pixels, the whole canvas is the drawing, it's what you get as an output.

In vector graphics canvas is virtually infinite, but since most of our work isn't infinite it's nice to have some frame or reference, which is the A4 page as a default in Inkscape. The page is also used to determine the coordinate system, check out the ruler

You can hide the page border (the shadow is then hidden automatically) in Document Properties (Shift + Ctrl + D).

TarekFM wrote:did another search.......your artwork should fit within that box.......cool!

Not necessarily, you can draw "outside the lines" and choose which drawing parts to export, but the Page area is usually used when building thumbnails on systems that support SVG format and when exporting to PDF.

I'm fairly sure I understand your inquiry... I just posted an inquiry here that's related to your question, about zoom during startup. The "default box" you're referring to is Inkscape showing the outline of the page that was generated as per the values you'd set as the default under document properties. The problem isn't that it's generating a random box. The problem is that the default zoom of Inkscape at startup makes the page area much smaller than the displayed work area. If the first thing you do after startup is use the "View/Zoom" menu to select "Page", you'll see that box expand to fill the work area.

A little extra here... prkos just told me how to fix this, in that other thread. Reset the zoom of the display to make the page fill the work area, then save that zoomed blank document as "default.svg" in the Inkscape templates folder. (Inkscape/share/templates) Then, when you start up Inkscape the next time, it should use that file w/ its zoom info as the default new document - and, the page will be filling the work area. It worked for me...(!)

thx sooo much everybody 4 replies and thorough responses, been away from computer for a bit!! Thx again!!:-)