Scratchpad clippingtutorial

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Revision as of 02:06, 27 June 2007 by Ryanlerch (talk | contribs) (started clipping section...)
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here is the tutorial scratchpad for the Clipping/masking/patterns tutorial. When this gets to a level of "completeness" it will be converted into docbook xml format and commited to the SVN.

On images: please upload SVG format images. However, the PNG thumbs are not working properly on the wiki, so just provide a link to the uploaded SVG on the wiki.

Title

Clipping, Masking and Patterns

Author(s)

ryan lerch, ryanlerch at gmail dot com

Abstract

This tutorial covers the usage of the clip and mask functions in inkscape, as well as how to create, apply and edit patterns to fills and strokes.

Body

Clipping

The clip function in inkscape allows an object or a group of objects to be clipped(cropped) so that only parts of the elements are visible. Clipping can be applied to any object (including linked and imbedded bitmaps.)

The easiest way to understand clipping is to see it in action. Take the following assortment of objects:

http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/images/Clipmaskpat-f01.svg

Now, place another object on top of all the others. This is what we are using for our clipping object. Note that the z-order of the clipping object is important, as Inkscape takes the top-most object as the clipping object. Also note that the style(fill, stroke, opacity etc) of the object is irrelevant, all that is used when clipping is the shape of the object.

http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/images/Clipmaskpat-f02.svg

The next step is to select all the objects that you want clipped and the clipping object, and in the menus go to object > clip > set. The result is:

http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/images/Clipmaskpat-f03.svg

As you can see, only the parts of the objects that were inside the bounds of the clipping object are visible now.

Masking

Patterns