Inkscape Patterns Problem

Everything Else
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Not sure where to put this so I will start here in Everything Else. In inkscape I know you can make a variety of patterns in many ways. In a past post there was an explanation of the clone feature.

You can also make a pattern using “object to pattern” and then fill in a shape with that pattern.The pattern can be manipulated from there, too. Here is where my problem starts. Lets say you have a letter that has been turned into a path. A “B” say. You can use the pattern tool to fill that B, but the pattern (created by object to pattern) that you place in the letter (or any other shape) is NOT a vector and, as far as I can tell, you can’t change the pattern into a vector. This means that if you want a pattern to perfectly (and automatically) be placed/fit into a shape, you have to freehand the pattern. That is what I did to achieve the pattern in the picture. Does anyone with more experience have a different view? I simply could not get the automatically generated pattern made using object to pattern to go vector.

Referencing the past post, you can make vectored patterns with the clone tool, but I don’t think inkscape recognises it as a pattern that can be placed into a shape and cropped to fit automatically. Or at least I don’t see a way to do this. Any others see it differently? Any help is greatly appreciated. The picture is what I am trying to achieve with the line pattern being a vector that can be recognised in the GFUI. Of course, Ideally a pattern would be made automagically without having to trace over it with the bezier tool. One could also make the font and pattern in photoshop, then import and scan the bit map, etc. That is just additional work added that seem like it should be avoidable. Maybe not though! All help is greatly appreciated! 01

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In Inkscape you can go to Edit -> Make a Bitmap Copy. This will place a bitmap over the top of your path & pattern B, so you may want to delete it and just leave the bitmap. This is not ideal, you’ll be engraving your stylized B instead of cutting/scoring, but it will work.

At this point you could also do a Path -> Trace Bitmap and wind up with a bunch of paths that may have to be cleaned up by hand. Depends on how much time you want to spend.

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Yes you have to bring the bitmap out and back in as trace bitmap does not work for a pattern. You can however set your edge width to zero and bring back only the pattern and leave the outline as a score but the pattern like the shading does not yet transfer to the GFUI yet but they have promised that for awhile and perhaps the patterns will transfer too :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

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By at this point, I meant after you did a Make a Bitmap Copy. It won’t trace a pattern, but it will trace a bitmap copy of a pattern. You’ll have two paths where you only wanted one, the paths won’t be as clean/straight as you want them and it will require a bunch of boring and time consuming node deleting and editing, but you could eventually get there.

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If you build from a black and white checkerboard you will only have one path and the higher the number of pixels the fewer jaggies, but yes clean up can be a pain. If a simple cross hatch, it would be easier to make the original cross hatch and manually trim it.

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“Manually”. You’d want to use path->cut path and then just delete the cutoff ends. Way faster than moving all the modes one by one.

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