Text clipping or some weirdness

[fionnabhair]

I'm brand-new to Inkscape and vector drawing in general, and I'm trying to start with a letter, and it seems I'm already running into trouble. For some reason, the top portion of my letter - R, in this case, in the font Celtic Knots - is not visible. Occasionally I can click around and do a dance and say the magic four-letter words, and the top portion will come up. Then I go to modify my letter, to erase a part of it, and absolutely nothing happens. Nothing is erased.

Running Inkscape on a Mac, OS X 10.11.5, newest version of Inkscape and XQuartz (just downloaded in the past few days).

Here's a screenshot of my weird letter issue (the red rectangles are not part of my Inkscape image, they've been added to the screenshot to highlight the letter problem):

[brynn]

Welcome to Inkscape Community!

Hhm, I notice that the top of the letter is showing up in the Icon Preview dialog.  Is it a free font?  If you have a download link, and it's free, I'll download and test.

Some info that might help....  There's a bug with Inkscape used on a Mac OS X, where any time you paste something, it becomes rasterized, and no longer vector.  So if you might have used Paste, that could explain why the Eraser isn't working.  The advice is to use Duplicate instead of copy/paste.  More info about Mac issues.

I typically never use the Eraser tool.  It's like a concept of raster graphics that's been wedged into the vector Inkscape.  So once you learn how to use the true vector tools (paths, path operations, node editing, etc.), you'll find the Eraser tool isn't needed.

And the other thing, is that the Eraser tool seems to be a bit buggy, at least in my experience.  It seems to work well for some people, but it doesn't work very well for me.

The R letter in your screenshot -- is that still text, or has it been converted to a path.  I'm not sure if the Eraser can be used on text....[off to test...].  No, doesn't work at all for me.  But I'm still not sure if it's supposed to or not.

You don't happen to have any white rectangles around in the image?  Or use any Clipping or Filters?  Does the problem happen with other fonts?  Or is it only with that font?  Have you noticed if zooming affects it?

If you don't need the text to remain as text, you might try converting to path (Path menu > Object to Path) and try the Eraser again.  You could also check the options on the control bar, to make sure you have it set up correctly. Here's the manual info on the Eraser tool:  http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/Eraser.html

Although, you didn't specifically say you were trying to use the Eraser tool.  So if you aren't, how are you doing the erasing?

Which part do you want to erase?  Maybe we can suggest another way to remove the unwanted parts?

In the end though, it might be a display issue.  I've experienced something like that before, although it's usually brief.  Is it always the exact same portion that's missing?  Or is there sometimes more or less that's missing?  Does it happen on all the letters? 

Well, sorry for so many questions.  My best guess is that it's a display issue, that should be fairly brief.  But there are a lot possibilities that we can consider.

[fionnabhair]

The font is here, and it's free. It seems to be this font only that I'm having trouble with (I haven't tested all my fonts, but Inkscape keeps reverting to the default san-serif, and that font works just fine, as well as another font I downloaded from that same site). It's also always the top part of the letter. Sometimes I might see a little more of the letter appear, I think, and sometimes the whole letter is visible, but I cannot explain why or make that happen reliably.

There was no copy/pasting. It is still text, not a path. No white rectangle. No clipping or filters; I typed in the letter, played around with the size (within the font tool and by using the selection tool and dragging arrows around).

I was thinking about trying to create a fancy illuminated letter, like the kind you see in old medieval manuscripts, and was using the Eraser tool to remove some of the knotwork-like embellishments in the middle of the R, as I may want to put something else in that space, and to get more familiar with the tools and what I can do with them.

I think you're right about it being a display issue of some kind, since the whole letter appears in the preview. It's just weird, and a bit irritating because I will need to be able to see the whole letter if I want to illuminate it.

[brynn]

Ah-HA!!

I installed, and I have the exact same problem!

After your last comments, I was going to say that if this is only happening in this 1 font, it may be that the font is just not very well made.  Inkscape seems to be quite particular about fonts, and if a font isn't well made, sometimes Inkscape can't use it at all.  But since I installed, and having the same problem on Windows, I think this is just something about how the font is made.  It seems like there is some unseen border, and the font designer made the letters too big for that border.

However, as soon as I convert the text to path, the entire letters are showing up!  So as long as you can handle the paths, that will probably solve the problem.  Let me find a good tutorial, to help you learn about path editing, to remove the portions that you don't want (actually it's usually referred to as node editing)....

This one, in the manual, is meant to introduce to paths:  http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/AShortExampleLogo.html
And the middle part of Help menu > Tutorials > Advanced is also an introduction to paths (just ignore that fact it's called "advanced" - it's meant for teaching newbies).  Right below the section on pasting, starts the path info.

Wow, just realizing for the I-don't-know-how-many times, that we need a nice and newer tutorial, for teaching node editing and path manipulations.  Gotta put it on my list    But for now you can visit the Home tab, and find loads and loads of tutorials.  The way I have them organized, generally how I decide if a tutorial should be for beginners or intermediate, is which features are involved.  If a tutorial uses a lot of node editing or path manipulations, it's usually in the Intermediate box.  If it's mostly about shapes, or if it's described very, very clearly, it goes in Beginner.  (Those of Mark Crutch (aka "Xav") are excellent, but they aren't set up to be searchable.  So it's hard to identify which ones are for node editing and path manipulations, except by looking through, one PDF at a time.)

One thing I notice about the font, and maybe it was on purpose, but it looks like the letters are entirely hand made.  I mean the parts that should be completely straight, aren't, and the curves aren't smooth, etc.  I would love to see this font made with more precision.  But I know that most celtic knot images and drawings also look hand made.  So maybe it was just a style choice for the designer.

Anyway, let us know if you need any help with path or node editing