Hi all,

Does Inkscape has an efficient way of selecting only the visible objects? I just know about one approach — holding Alt and dragging the mouse. Every visible object touched by the selection path gets selected.

However, in case of a lot of small objects, this might not be a very practical method. Therefore, it would be very useful if we could do the same using a rubber-band selection.

I included a basic example to illustrate my point. The file contains a green surface consisting of 9 rectangles on top of a mesh consisting of 9 other rectangles. How can I select all surface rectangles at once without selecting the mesh rectangles underneath?

What version of Inkscape are you using? Development and probably soon to be released 0.49 versions have a select same command in the edit menu that allows you to select an object and then select everything with the same stroke or stroke style or fill etc.

A similar function is possible with the 'find' command in previous versions.

This assumes that there will be SOMETHING that will be in common among all the objects to be selected, or, conversely, among all the objects not to be selected so you could select those and then invert selection. If this is a one shot project, there's not much to be done, but if you are looking for a working method, you could draw all objects used as guides or 'frameworks' using a particular style - say a definite stroke width or style or color - and then you could select those objects easily.

Hope this has helped.

druban wrote:What version of Inkscape are you using?

I'm using 0.48.4. Tried to compile the development version and use it locally (i.e. only make, no sudo make install), but this results in some problems regarding the icons and shortcuts. Haven't had time to look into this

druban wrote:A similar function is possible with the 'find' command in previous versions.

Ah, completely forgot about Ctrl + F. Using the value Stroke:#000000 in the Style field selects everything with a black stroke (i.e. the mesh). Inverting the selection then selects all green rectangles. Thanks!

I would used Layers. Put all the green squares on a new layer, them make the 1st layer invisible.

Or since there are only 9 squares, I would more likely select them one at a time with Shift. And then Group them, to make future selection easier. But for more than that, I would use layers.