aha! thank you dr. uban. i get it! i am trying to isolate a basic tesselation unit. As you might be able to recognize, these birds are the outline of an escher drawing. I need the file size to be <200k because it's going to be sent to a drawing robot with a small memory. So my plan is to get the bas...

... In either case the final output of intersection - or any boolean -is going to be a single path, so if you are looking for a trimming effect this is not the route. the nuance of that statement has escaped me. i understand it to mean that any paths remaining after the boolean operation are all me...

I have an image with 7 paths (attached) When I place a rectangle over this and do an intersection, the results are unexpected-everything disappears! I tried grouping the paths into one object but this does not help. If I select only one path, then intersection works. Am I overloading inkscape with t...