I drew up a guide on removing and hiding parts of objects (ie, making holes) in Inkscape. It'll be best to download and open in Inkscape, so you can play around with the objects and see how the masks are arranged (and because it probably won't render properly in a browser). I wanted to make the final example a little more elaborate, with an automatically-updating outline that would not get hole-punched, but I noticed it took ages to open when I tried that. I'll whip that up as a separate example and link to it tonight.

Anyway, here it is: Holes: A Guide to Erasing in Inkscape

Great guide. I think a lot of people will appreciate it. One thing that stumped me with clips, coming from Illustrator, was that if you don't group the objects you wan to clip you'll get a seperate clip for each object. So if you are clipping three objects you get three indipendant clips - Illustrator would automatically group them creating one clip. I'm not sure if it's something you feel is worth mentioning - it took me ages before I realised I could group them and then apply the clip.

Funny that Opera doesn't display the file properly. It gets all the images right, but looses the paragraphs of text.

microUgly wrote:Great guide. I think a lot of people will appreciate it.

Thanks. I figured out some of the methods in it when I needed to use them, so I thought they might be useful to others.

microUgly wrote:One thing that stumped me with clips, coming from Illustrator, was that if you don't group the objects you wan to clip you'll get a seperate clip for each object.

That's a good point. I'll add it to the description of clips.

microUgly wrote:Funny that Opera doesn't display the file properly. It gets all the images right, but looses the paragraphs of text.

The paragraphs are all flowed text, linked to rectangles. I took a cue from the tutorials packaged with Inkscape for that. From what I've read on the mailing list, flowed text is a problem area for many renderers.

How did you save it as a svg? When I try to save the file in Opera it comes up as xml.

Try right-clicking the link and choosing Save Link As (or Opera's equivalent). Also, even if Opera displays the XML, you should be able to save the file and have Inkscape open it. SVG files are just XML, after all.

capnhud wrote:How did you save it as a svg? When I try to save the file in Opera it comes up as xml.

That happened with me also, but I assumed it was because I was using the alpha version of Opera 9.5. I simply renamed the file extension after I had downloaded it.