hello all ; new to site ; am using print shop and / or print master in making designs for black tee shirts . the machine I print with ,the Freejet tx , shows the white background around the letters that I want to print . Will Inkscape allow me to somehow use a feature like transparency in photoshop to get rid of the white background ? thanks for the help .

Is the image you are using made in Inkscape? Or is it a bitmap image?

Inkscape supports transparency, that is the default background "color". You can trace your drawing with paths and then clip it to make everything outside paths transparent, although GIMP might be a better tool for that if you're using a bitmap image.

If the image isn't complex you can maybe recreate it in Inkscape, there's also a Trace bitmap function to make it easier. Then you export to png or pdf, whatever your printing machine supports.