Instant Inkscape! Edit Nodes to customize your cuts!

Quick and easy, but I think I’m going to use this a ton.

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I think you are misunderstanding the nodes in this video.

  1. Select the jigsaw
  2. Select Path, Break Apart
  3. If it all goes black, just select fill X and stroke Colour
  4. Click on the rectangle and set it to another stroke colour

The path has been output as one single path, including the rectangle. The Break Apart separates the paths out to individual lines. The rectangle is still a single path.

This way there is no need to draw a new rectangle and get the sizes right.

If you did want to stick to the method you have video’d, it would be better to draw the new rectangle first then the click to points would make sure the new rectangle was the right size. Delete the old rectangle afterwards. But this is much harder.

In nearly all circumstances where you have a complex SVG download, the method I have given will get you the outline. One other trick to add is if you do a Ctrl-+ Path Union, this would just give you the rectangle and remove all the lines inside the rectangle (other irregular shapes too)

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I think you mean Control-A followed by Path->union. And yes this will work, but one gotcha: be sure that everything you’re selecting is a path, no groups or lines or other types of objects. If any of the selected items are not paths, booleans will fail.

To be pedantic, if you’ve just done the Break Apart, the whole thing is selected anyway, and what you actually want to do if you are doing this to some other object is grab the whole thing, but not necessarily Ctrl-A because you might have other elements in your drawing. But we’re now splitting hairs :slight_smile:

Regards the Union, absolutely groups will not union, and really easy to miss unless you are actually looking for it when you do the select - it will tell you on the status line if there are groups.

It’s the internet, it’s what we do.

Control-a is a bad plan in case you have anything else in the doc…

By going to the transform window it is very easy to set the size of anything just by typing in the numbers. An added benefit is that it resizes from the center and not the lower left corner as other methods do.

If you keep the object window open the nature of what you are working with is obvious as it would not be otherwise.

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If you pick the sub-group (ShIft+Ctl+ Select) they will union (or other boolean) quite nicely even if multiple groups deep and in different groups (they will usually go to the lowest object)

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