Inkscape Community

Help Using Inkscape => Inkscape Beginners' Questions => Topic started by: janvanman on January 16, 2018, 07:35:00 AM

Title: Disappearing Text
Post by: janvanman on January 16, 2018, 07:35:00 AM

Hi All.  First post here and I'm completely new to inkscape.  I'm having a funny issue where I created a very simple design with some text.  When I save the file as an svg, the text disappears in the browser.  In Gimp, the text sections look they've been redacted with grey.  I've attached a screenshot of what the image looks like in inkscape (inkscape.png), in gimp (gimp.png) and in the broswer when I just double click the file (browswer.png).  Please advise what I'm doing wrong or what I can look at as possible problems.  Thanks, S  [ You are not allowed to view attachments ]  [ You are not allowed to view attachments ]  [ You are not allowed to view attachments ]

Title: Re: Disappearing Text
Post by: brynn on January 16, 2018, 08:30:41 AM

Welcome to the forum!

Most likely you've used Flowed Text, which really only works in Inkscape.  The developers keep it around because it can be so useful, but there's no SVG standard for it.  So browsers or other viewers can't display it.

3 choices:

• You can do Text menu > Convert to Text (might change some of the formatting).
• Or since there's so little text, you could just re-create it.  Instead of dragging out a text box first (this is one way to create Flowed Text), just click once on the canvas, and start typing (this creates regular text).
• This will make sure that the text will be displayed, no matter where you put it.  However, after you do this, you can no longer edit the text as text.  It will become paths.  If it's a lot of text, you can save the text as text in a hidden layer or outside the page border, or something like that.  Then if you ever need to edit, you don't have to type it all again.  There are 2 ways to do this, and it depends on your goals, which one you want to use.
  
  Path menu > Object to path (each single character or punctuation mark is a path, and all the paths are put into a Group)
  or
  Path menu > Union (all the text becomes a single path, made up of as many sub-paths as there are characters or punctuation)

I'm pretty sure that's going to be the problem.  But if it's not, please share the SVG file with us  :)

Title: Re: Disappearing Text
Post by: janvanman on January 16, 2018, 08:44:16 AM

Thanks so much brynn.  Your suggestions worked perfectly.   :ur:

Title: Re: Disappearing Text
Post by: brynn on January 16, 2018, 09:29:40 AM

Happy drawing!