Hi

I'm Renee from South Africa and totally new to Inkscape.

I used to use Corel Trace, but what little I have seen on Inkscape, I already like it a lot more.

I'm a Digi Scrapbooking designer that loves to draw. Recently I have hand drawn a whole lot of pictures that I have scanned and now want to turn into png images for digi scrapping.

I have no problem with opening my image, tracing the bitmap, but this is where I get stuck.

1. If I save it as a svg it saves the original and the path on a white background.
2. If I copy the path to a new file and export that as a png it either doesn't save at all or saves as a blank file.

If I look at my page properties it does show that my page is transparent. It's very important to me to save my files as svg's as I want to resize them to scrappers size and some of the drawings are quite small and also not have a background as it means I have to redraw it in my program of choice in any case. I mainly work in Paintshop Pro as it allows you to open svg files and resize immediately.

I sincerely hope that someone can please help me

I'm not sure what your problem is. Can you post pictures. When you copy and paste is it from an inkscape file to another inkscape file? What you are looking for is transparent background?

It's difficult to know, but one thing I would suggest is that you make sure the image is within your document page area.

Hi Renee,
Welcome aboard!

1. If I save it as a svg it saves the original and the path on a white background.

Inkscape doesn't show the typical checkerboard for transparency. But if you look in Doc Properties > Page tab > General, you can see the Background settings. As long as it's half checkerboard and half any color, your background is transparent. You can change it to non-transparent, or anything in between, by clicking on it. And as well, you can change the color of the background (which I often do if I'm working with very light colors, then I change it back before I export).

As for the trouble exporting, I would echo microUgly -- be sure your image is inside the image borders. At the bottom of the same Doc Prop tab, you see checkboxes for showing page border. I usually uncheck that, myself, while I work. But then I have to turn it back on when I'm finished, to center my image. Then I turn it off again before exporting.....actually, I'm not sure, but I think the Page Border itself doesn't get exported. Not sure about that, but I get rid of the border before exporting, just to be safe.

The other thing I would check, is the export settings. You have the choice to export the Drawing, Page, Selection, or a Custom size. If you export Drawing, but your image is outside the Page Border, it will export blank. Or if you export Selection, but there's no selection.....and so on. Also check the Bitmap Size is appropriate.

I hope you can get it figured out. Let us know how it goes.
All best