Hello people.

I am using Inkscape 0.48.3.1 r9886 on Linux Ubuntu 12.10 64-bit and my "Fill and Stroke" menu is greyed out and not working, no way to change the colors ...
Please help.

Thanks.

Welcome to the forum

Something has to be selected for the F/S to be "clickable". Maybe you accidentally deselected?

Hi,

If I may offer a slight correction: when you have nothing selected and pick a colour on a palette, the fill colour will change, but there will be no visual indication that it has happened. The Fill / Stroke Status Bar will still say N/A, but the next time you draw a shape, it will have the fill colour as selected.

Perhaps, developers could correct that in future releases?

Yes, correct. You could click on a color in the palette, to choose your color before drawing. But the F/S dialog will remain unclickable until something is selected.

As for correcting it, I'm not sure if there actually is a problem. Many people who switch from raster editors to Inkscape are accustomed to choosing the color first, and then drawing. But in Inkscape, you should draw first, and then change the color afterwards. I think developers have made it so that you CAN choose the color first, if you want to. But the fill and stroke indicators cannot display a fill or stroke for something that's not even drawn yet. Just because you've chosen a color before drawing doesn't mean the the fill and stroke indicators should display that color. That would make it not a very helpful tool! If it displayed a color for something that hasn't been drawn, I would think I had something selected. It would be too confusing for me. At least that's my opinion

brynn, you're spot-on..it's my first brush-off with vector graphics and I'm used to selecting colour before drawing (as opposed to sketching and then colouring). However, this particular problem only came up when I was trying to draw yellow stars on the blue EU flag and couldn't see any because the stars retained previously-used style, i.e blue.

Pilosopong Tasyo wrote:Depending on what tool is currently active, you'll find the visual indication at the upper right corner of the Inkscape window.

Perfect. This way everyone's happy

I'm sorry but I have to disagree. I don't really see how selecting your color beforehand is different for raster vs. vector graphics. That's just good human machine interface. If I have several objects I'm going to create (I want to use inkscape to do the lettering and bubbling on a comic) then I want to set my standard defaults instead of going in and setting those values for each object. There has to be a way to set stroke and fill defaults before I go and create multiple objects.

Fill and stroke are indicated in the upper right of the toolbar. Try the latest pre-release 0.91... seems the cursor now shows shape and color.