Hi, I'm having trouble drawing elipses and rectangles. All of a sudden they do not show up any more. Take a look at this screenshot:



That is supposed to be an elipse.

Does anyone know why this is happening?

Thanks
Astralogic

I managed to fix it by uninstalling and reinstalling, but I want to understand what happened so I don't have uninstall and reinstall every time that happens.

Welcome to InkscapeForum!

If you'll look in the bottom left corner of the Inkscape window, you'll see info on the style of selected objects. (I think these are called the Style Indicators -- where you can look to see details about the style of selected object.) ("Style" includes anything about the appearance of an object -- color, opacity, stroke width, etc.) Notice the tiny spinbox labelled "O:" which has a value of 0 in your screenshot. This indicates that the object is fully transparent (i.e. invisible). 100 is fully opaque. You can change the opacity right there, if you like. Or it can be changed in the Fill and Stroke dialog (Object menu) as well.

Probably, the last time you drew something with the Ellipse or Rectangle tool, you later made them transparent. For some reason that has never been explained to me, and which I think is rather ridiculous, the default behavior of Inkscape is to give the style of every newly drawn object the same style as the last thing that was drawn with that particular tool. Most people don't know this, and I don't know who would ever expect such behavior. But even for those who have realized it, they probably don't remember what they did with Inkscape, the last time they used it. And they certainly can't predict the next time they will use that tool. The whole thing is absurd, imo.

But I'll stop there, before I get into a rant, lol. The bottom line, fortunately, is that behavior can be changed. Double-click on any tool, to open Inkscape Prefs to that tools's options. Draw something with that tool, and give it whatever color and opacity you want it to draw, every time you use it. Leave it selected, then click "This tool's own style" (or it's something close to that) in Inks Prefs. Then click "Take from selection". And that's it. Now your ellipses will always be drawn in whatever style you set.

Let us know if have any problems with that

Edit
PS - If anyone would like to write up an FAQ message about that, I'll add it to the FAQ topic (viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2037). It's on my to-do list, but it keeps getting pushed back, lol.

If you look at the bottom left of your screenshot you can see a control labelled "O:" which is set to zero. That's the opacity of your selected object, and a value of zero renders it transparent. Set that to a bigger percentage value, or right click on the control for some quick shortcuts.

Inkscape has many, many ways to make things invisible, and the opacity of an object is just one of them. I try my best to draw attention to some of them in my Inkscape Tutorials (viewtopic.php?f=6&t=11981) as I know it's a recurrent problem for people new to the software.

Edit: Beaten to the punch by Brynn

Thanks guys, I was beginning to think it was a bug or something. All tools that can be set to use their own style has been done, and I agree, they really should default to their own style.

I will no doubt have more questions down the road about this great app

Thanks again.
Asralogic

Hi, I had this problem too, however, in my case the Alpha component was zero on my fill colour. Once I set the Alpha component to non-zero I could see my shapes!

So I finally got around to writing a tutorial

What To Do When a Tool Stops Working (Or Tools Are Drawing Invisible Objects)

That's a handy resource to point people to, Brynn.

One addition I would make is to suggest switching to the outline view mode. That will let the user see if the object is actually present but invisible, or not present at all. It will also mean that they can select it, even though they can't normally see it - and then it will remain selected when they switch back to the normal view mode.

It might also be worth mentioning stroke width - an unfilled shape will seem to vanish completely if the stroke width is set to zero, even though it's still there and can be selected in the outline view mode. If the fill is set to the same colour as the background it will also appear to vanish, but it's a bit easier to select it by clicking in the general area in that case.