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 desire and FAQ - but can’t find anything that helps. He’s my unforgivably noob question.

Image below of the London Underground “roundel” – I need to isolate the red white and blue aspects into a vector image with no background (for printing) and although I already have the image saved in EPS, SVG and PDF formats I’m damned if I can work out how to remove the black background, short of laboriously retracing the (non black part) image.

Is there either something utterly obvious that I’m missing or an idiot proof tutorial somewhere? Even a short kick in the right direction like being told what I should be learning would be a head saver.

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

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.

Haha. I bet you're not stupid.

Would you be willing to post the SVG file so that we could take a look at it? Peraps your SVG file has everything grouped and ungrouping it would allow for you to remove the black background. I know it doesn't answer your question but the shapes are so simple that I bet it could be recreated in less than a minute...2 circles, rectangle, and some text.

I guess the same. Open the file in inkscape, click the roundel, press the ungroup button, click the black background, press delete.

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

Thought of another possibility. The document background could be set as black. In which case its:
Open document in inkscape
File->Document Properties
Click to the right of the word "Background", and set the colour to white (or transparent)

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.

For future reference, when you select an object the status bar at the bottom of the Inkscape window will tell you what type of object you have selected (i.e. group, clipping, or a normal shape).

I had to create an account just to say thank you for the suggestion of Ungrouping the logo. I am making a soccer team banner for my son's AYSO team and have never used a vector editor. I was bumbling through this whole process and was able to make something decent using Shutterstock eps files but now I was able to remove the background white without degrading the quality of the art overall. Thank you again to users like you that can explain something potentially simple to a newbie user. I can now make something I will truly be proud of when it is printed on a large scale.