Hey fellow artists,

I tried to search for stroke errors to no avail, so hopefully someone can help me.

I've been drawing circles all morning. White fills and varying stoke widths and colors.
About 20 minutes ago, all of a sudden, the circle tool starts drawing circles where I can't adjust the stroke or stroke fill.
At least not visibly. So now I'm stuck with circles and no outlines.

What did I do? I probably bumped a setting unknowingly, but how do I get back to adjustable strokes?

The stroke and stroke fill work fine with the rectangle tool.

Thanks for any advice! Of course this happens as my designs start getting really exciting ... doh.

Pic for reference:

So I think I solved it.

I drew a rectangle and redefined the stroke and stoke fill, then immediately drew a circle
and it worked!

What was that? A glitch?

In the screenshot in the bottom left corner it's shown that your stroke is partially transparent, maybe it was so transparent it was barely visible or you even set the opacity to 0.

Opacity can be changed for the whole object (Opacity slider in Fill and Stroke), or for the fill or stroke individually (A slider, A is for alpha).

When you changed the rectangle style you set the new default style so new object picked it up. You could have changed A slider for the original circle and you would be able to see the stroke.

Sometimes I'll have a similar problem, if I've been working on a large image for a long time (several hours without a break). Save, close, and restart Inkscape solves it.

Red_2 wrote:So I think I solved it.

I drew a rectangle and redefined the stroke and stoke fill, then immediately drew a circle
and it worked!

What was that? A glitch?

your inkscape preferences can be set to "use the last applied style" for each tool. If your ellipse tool is set to this, instead of "use this tool's own style", then every time you change your fill and stroke for an object on canvas the next circle you draw will have that fill and stroke. This current style may be accidentally changed (perhaps by clicking or click dragging on the palette) resulting in no stroke no fill objects or entirely transparent objects.

It is more convenient for some tools (e.g. bezpen, pencil) to have the prefs set one way and for others (e.g. rectangle, star) to have it set the opposite. Thank the codewriters of Inkscape for leaving each choice up to us!

I get that sometimes as well. In addition to the good answers above, possibly you could have switched the color of the stroke to be the same as the fill, therefore not seeing it. You'll never which one really happened, but you'll be ready for it the next time it occurs.
dee