An Inkscape "How-To"

How do I get the stars and ‘text’ (converted it to path) to NOT print? IOW, I want only the skull outside the stars and “III” to print.

Also, is there an easier way to place the stars (other than manually) along a circular path? I ended up creating a circle, and then eyeballing the placement of each star to a grid, then deleting the circle and grouping the stars. Spacing looks fairly consistent, but there must be a more efficient and precise way.

Punisher III

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Make each element a different color, and when you bring it into the interface, you can set that color to be Ignored.

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If you color the elements differently in inkscape they will be presented on the side bar thumbnails as separate operations, where you can ignore any you choose.

Align and distribute would be the tool for placement, but I’m not strong enough with it to tell you how.

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Thanks Jules and PrintToLaser.

Quick follow up question:

As two separate print operations, (ignore stars and text, print skull or vice versa) what tells GFUI to never print where stars and text go?

You’ll need to do a Boolean / pathfinder operation to subtract the stars/text outlines from the print area.

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In Inkscape I had to ungroup all of your elements several times to get your stars, text and skull to be separate elements. Then selected the stars and text by dragging a selection box around them. Next selected the skull, and under path hit “exclusion”. Shows a skull with the stars and text cut out. Didn’t apply here but if you have real text in an SVG the GFUI will not process it. Have to convert most text to paths first.

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rpegg,

Thank you so much! That did the trick…obviously still learning about illustrator programs and I appreciate the patience and guidance you all afford us newbies. Hope to pay it forward someday.

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Duplicate as many stars as you want, Ctrl + d. It will stack them. You could also do the clone, but that adds complexity (is good to learn, but that’s another day.)

Draw a circle. Select your stack of stars then Object > Arrange > Polar Coordinates.

Don’t select rotate if you want the stars to remain in the original orientation.

Lot’s more tweaking and fine control to this, but this will give you what you want quick.

You can then delete the circle, in case you hadn’t thought what that would do.

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