First post here --- appreciate any and all help. Search archives for similar questions, without luck.

I'm trying to change the stroke characteristics for one or more line segments within a larger path.

For example, imagine I draw a square, and I want the vertical lines in the square to be dotted, and the horizontal lines to be solid. I've tried selected the nodes surrounding a line segment along that path, with the hope of applying the stroke characteristic (dotted) to it, but that didn't work. Obviously, it applied it to the whole path.

What I've so far done to make this work is to duplicate the path, and alternatively delete portions of the path in each copy, and then apply the stroke characteristics to the entire path. This is much more labor intensive, especially so since my real cases are much more complicated than simple squares.

Any suggestions, please? Thanks so much!

I guess it sounds like you've found the best....possibly the only solution. Although as I say that.....

So you realize that now, you don't have just 1 path anymore. Now there are 2 paths. So it leads me to wonder if your starting point really must be a single path or compound path? .....?

Hi, Thanks for your reply.

To answer your question: starting point must (unfortunately) be single path, as far as I can see. I'm importing a complex shape from another program (which exports it in PDF, not SVG). When inkscape imports the PDF it generates a single path for all lines that touch.

Any other options for me, please? Or is current workflow the only way to achieve the effect I want?

Thanks!

Do you specifically need to modify the path, or would a purely visual effect do the job? If you can get away with the latter then something like this might work:

0) You may want to change the document background colour in File > Document Properties, so that the rest of the steps stand out more.
1) Import your path.
2) Draw a box that covers it and set the fill to a white-striped pattern.
3) Rotate the box 90 degrees and adjust the size so it's still covering the path. You should have a lot of horizontal stripes.
4) Adjust the box position so that very few of the horizontal lines in the path are peeking out between the white stripes.
5) Draw additional white boxes over those lines to cover them.
6) Group everything *except* the original path.
7) Select your group and path. For a simple image with nothing else in, Edit > Select All will do.
8) Object > Mask > Set (or "Set Mask" from the context menu on your selected objects.

You can release the mask, enter the group (double-click on it) and tweak the positions of the boxes and scale of the stripes to get the effect you want. Basically anything covered by white will be visible in the final masked image, anything that is covered by black or transparent will not be visible. So you can draw extra black and white objects to tweak the results as necessary.

See the attached file for an example. Un-set the mask to see the component parts.

If you need a really complex result, you can use several different masks on top of each other, but you need to group the results after applying each one. I.e. follow the steps above, group the result (it will be a group of one object). Draw another group of masking objects on top, apply the mask, group the result. Repeat as necessary. The second image in the file shows this approach, plus use of a black rectangle, to alter the appearance of the rightmost vertical line.

Warning: Depending on your original file and the extent to which you need to alter it, this approach may well prove to be even more labour intensive that the method you're currently using.

Hello

I don't know exactly how is your way of work, but let me tell you that, if you plan and organize your work, some activities can be done in a few steps, because in the current version of Inkscape you can separate your work by layers and sublayers, make selection of multiple objects based in a selection, etc, and / or use CSS3 with SVG files.

- How many styles of lines are you using?. Be aware that a line with lets say a black line with a "dotted" stroke of 0.1px, it is a different style than a black line with a "dotted" stroke of 0.101 px. I think you see what I mean.

- You have an Imported PDF file. If possible, try to select objects with same style and separate in layers or sub layers.

- A "trick" to cut several shapes is to combine them, then draw a "cutting path", and to a boolean operation. However, when the objects are open shapes, that trick generates bad results.

... mmmm ... can you post a "sample" of the work you try to do?

Greetings