I have a 3-view line drawing that I converted to a bit-map and scanned into Inkscape. I can see the path nodes over the entire drawing, but there is too much information there for my purposes. I have been trying to figure out how to seperately select the paths. Every time I try to select only a portion of the drawing, I either get only the entire drawing with multiple paths (multiple seperate images) or the selection is rejected. I would like to seperate the three views of the drawing and manipulate them seperately, or combine them back into inkscape in layers.

The procedure I have done so far is to start with a JPEG scan of the drawing, converted this to a bit-map in MS-Paint, imported this bit-map into inkscape. At this point Inkscape treats the entire drawing as a single image. I have thus far been unable to seperate the drawing into seperate components. This is true even after tracing the bitmap and discarding the initial bit-map image.

Thanks for your help in advance.

Welcome to InkscapeForum!

If the image starts out as a JPEG, then it IS a single image. I don't understand what you're doing with MS Paint. JPEG already IS a raster (bitmap) format, so you probably can skip that step. Although I may not clearly understand the situation.

Anyway, it sounds like you're importing the JPG and then using Trace Bitmap, to convert to vector. Can you tell us which settings you're using -- single scan or multiple scan? I don't understand what you mean by "the selection is rejected".

It sounds like we can probably get the 3 "frames" separated, but it's hard to say without at least knowing which settings you used. We might be able to sort it out without seeing the image, but it wouldn't hurt to show us a screenshot....if you could show us a screenshot after you've done the trace, that probably would be the most helpful.

This post belongs in the regular QA instead of here in Tricks & Tutorials.

Have a read of this thread, which might help:

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=13300