Hi all,

I have a problem with the clip object tool, resulting in very large file sizes that are hard to edit.

To explain the problem, take a picture with two layers. The background layer contains a pattern, and the foreground layer contains the same pattern, but clipped to some object and in different color (see attachment below: blue in the background, yellow in the foreground). Before applying the clip tool, the file size is about 150kb. After applying the clip tool, the file size jumps to about 800kb. While this is not dramatic, the picture I am working on contains much larger patterns, and the resulting file sizes easily exceed 30-40mb, which makes inkscape very slow and hard to use.

So my questions are: Is there another way of clipping that avoids these large file sizes, or some other workaround? Do you have an idea how I could achieve an effect like the one shown without the clip tool? For example, is there a way to _cut_ the blue quadrangles along the yellow object, completely erasing all parts that are not covered by this object? That should require less information to store than clipping, and would be fine for my purposes.


Thanks!

Welcome aboard!

My guess would be you applied the clipping to all the objects by selecting them all and set clipping.
That results each object having a somewhat separate clip path definition.
Would suggest grouping the objercts first, before the clipping.


Another workaround would be using filtering. In 0.92 you can set overlay, colorburn etc. which may make it possible to have one blue "pattern" only, with a yellow path blending in on top.

Thanks for the good hint, Lazur - grouping first indeed reduces the file significantly, that should hopefully solve the problem also for my big file.

It's also good to hear that 0.92 will bring further options ... hope it'll be in an ubuntu repository soon.

Don't know about that. If you're really keen, you can try to install via snap. It's supposed to work (but I suspect it will only work if you uninstall the old Inkscape first, still waiting for confirmation on that).

Oh, and if you're on Ubuntu 16.04 (or higher), the snap is supposed to be available via their app store (or whatever they call it).

Moini wrote:Oh, and if you're on Ubuntu 16.04 (or higher), the snap is supposed to be available via their app store (or whatever they call it).

It is indeed! And works nicely. Now I have to check out the new stuff

Glad to hear it works for you - I couldn't get any snap to start.

Moini wrote:Glad to hear it works for you - I couldn't get any snap to start.

Sorry to hear that - here all I needed to do was "sudo apt remove inkscape" followed by "sudo snap install inkscape".

It's a different problem for me - not a single snap would start. But at least I know someone who develops them, hope I'll get an answer...