thankyou kindly: a combination of the elusive "ungroup" and then simply selecting and deleting the black have left me with what (at least appears to be) a roundel with no BG. Kudos.

Ungrouping certainly sounds like something i should be doing. I will investigate and report back.

heathenx wrote:If you already have the SVG file then why can't you remove the background in that file?

Because I'm stupid and can't work out how.

Greets to all. I’m a complete beginner with Inkscape – I have a good few years photoshop under my belt but I’m brand new to vector manipulation. I’ve scoured for tutorials or easy-reader answers to what seems to me to be a simple enough “want” and what i would think would be a pretty standard basic ...