In the example above I applied a raster image to a star to give it a grunge texture (I have a tutorial on that here if you want to check that out.)

Path functions do not work on masked objects for the same reason they don’t work on clipped objects - they are not paths. You simply cannot unify clipped objects in Inkscape. As you can see in the example above, the result of unifying the clipped blue star with the green circle is that Inkscape referenced the blue square, even though it wasn’t visible any longer. Reason #4: Clipped ObjectsĪnother reason why union may not be working as expecting is because you’re trying to apply it to an object that is clipped with another object.Ī clipped object is not a path, so if you try performing path functions on a clipped object it is not going to work the way you expect it to work. When you do this, the black line essentially becomes the fill area and you should be able to unify them now. If you want to unify the line and the circle together, you’ll first have to convert the stroke to a path by selecting it and navigating to Path > Stroke to Path. If you unify these two objects together, you’re just going to end up with a green circle. Since there’s no fill area of the black line, there’s nothing there to merge with the green circle as far as Inkscape is concerned.

In the following example, the green circle has a full area, but the black stroke does not. So the fix for this is to simply ungroup your text object.Ĭertain path functions (like union) only work on objects that have a fill area. The reason for this is because when you convert a text object to a path, the result is a grouping of individual letters, and as I’ve outlined above, path functions do not work on groups of objects. However, if you have converted your text object to a path then the path functions will not work.

You can also grab the Text Tool and see if it’s still editable. You can determine if it’s still a text object by referencing the little node in the bottom-left corner of the object.

Inkscape tutorials path intersection