Ha, nice trick. It's working as I expect now. There's still the issue when I try to bend a big group of objects.
Thanks.

I don't know what I am doing wrong. How do you select all identical shapes by color&fill? I do not see the merge function. Also I made sure the preference setting is correct as suggested. I also moved the paths to force a rewrite. But it's still bending the wrong way. I tried your example on my ...

Thanks for the reply P. Except that it should be bending the other way (downward). But it only bends upward regardless of which way the copied Arc is pointing.

Thanks,
C.

Hum, never mind. It still does not work for the picture I actually want, even though I converted everything to paths. The path object is bending the wrong way and sometimes inkscape starts crashing when I paste the arc path in the "path effect bend" dialog. I am running Inkscape 0.92 on th...

Thank you it works. Converting the arc to a path first does the trick.
Thanks for the prompt reply.

Hello, When using path effect bend on 2 rectangle on top of each other, the resulting path is always bending downward irrespective of the fact the my arc path points upward or downward. I was expecting the bending to follow the path exactly. I added the source code for a MWE as an attachment. Any he...