I am having trouble getting Path Difference to work. I have a Mac and everything else seems to work fine. I have followed the tutorial through on the Hiking Club logo several times and, as far as I can tell, not missed anything out and have tried with other examples too. Clicking Path Difference or Ctrl+- doesn't do anything. Does anyone have any ideas?
Love and Light
Decahedron5D

Well, I guess I can cover the usual things, but we may end up needing to see your SVG file, to determine what is happeneing.

First, you must have paths to work with, not objects. Not groups either. Then the path that will be subracted must be on top (in z-order) of the path from which it will be removed (bottom minus top, if you will). Both paths should be selected, of course, before performing the operation.

And when you click difference (or keystroke), look at the status/info area at the bottom of the window. I it will give you some helpful information about what's happening (or not happening). If you still can't get it to work, post the info that's shown in your next reply.

Also, read about path operations in Help menu > Inkscape manual. Or in Help menu > Tutorials > Advanced.
Keep us posted

Thank you so much for your reply Brynn. I have been working through the tutorial and got to the Fuji Hiking Club Logo when I had this problem. Part 6 here http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL ... eLogo.html . I toggle both paths, get the message, '2 objects of types Path, Group in layer Layer1'. I Ctrl+- for Path - Difference and get message 'One of the objects is not a path, cannot perform boolean operation'. I have been through the sequence of operations several times and tried a few alternatives. If I select the mask and only one of the letters with Ctrl+Shift+click, the mask disappears and the whole letter remains untouched.
I am hoping I just missed something simple and shall kick myself when I find out.
D5

I'm not Brynn, but I can offer a suggestion: where your info line at the bottom says

'2 objects of types Path, Group

needs to say 'two objects of type path' only before most boolean ops will work. select each object and read the status line to see which one is the group. select it and ungroup it. If you have several paths it will be a problem, but you might be able to combine them into one and then try your boolean.

Yeah, what druban said, lol

I'm guessing it's the text that is still grouped. In step 4.a. it was converted from text (Object to path) to path, which makes individual paths out of each character, with all of the character paths grouped. Then it was supposed to be ungrouped.

But don't feel bad or kick yourself I think we get more questions about this tutorial than any other. It's a rather comlicated and involved tutorial. But it does cover many basic tasks, and is a fast route to learn a lot.

I think Inkscape behaviour as changed since the tutorial was written. Using object to path on text currently creates a group of individual paths, one for each letter. Previously (IIR) It created one compound path containing all the letters. This behaviour was a pain, as you would have to select the path and break it apart, then recombine each letter individually to get the holes back in them.

-Rob A>

Link to updated version of the tutorial (draft for 0.48):
A Hiking Club Logo—An Exercise in Paths

Thanks for the input, that explains a few things. In the end, I resorted to duplicating the mountain mask and cropping the letters individually as it would not work as a group. I would proudly display my result but I cannot find a file extension that loads to the forum.
Hey, I learnt a lot which was the object of the exercise and got to use quite a few bits I did not know where there.
Thanks again.
Dec