How can i separate the text from the stroke. Please have a look at the attachment as an example. Im trying to do something similar but want to so the black outline can be moved as a separate piece. Its for laser cutting the idea being engraving the text then using the outline to cut to the same shape. I cannot for the life of me figure out how to do it. thanks for any idea that is posted.

You might try making a copy and using offsets.

Is that a screenshot of Adobe Illustrator? If you're using Illustrator, we....well, most of us can't help. I think a few of us know how to use it.

If it's a raster image, such as the JPG which you attached, it cannot be separated - not with inkscape, maybe in AI, I have no idea really. If it's a JPG, PNG, GIF, or TIFF, and you want to use Inkscape, you'll have to either trace it, or draw it from scratch. (tylerdurden is showing one way to draw it above.)

If it's already made of vector paths, and you want to use Inkscape, it looks like possibly Ungrouping would help. Might have to ungroup a few times. Keep clicking Ungroup until the status bar says "No more groups to ungroup". Then it should be separate.

Separate is one thing, but if you just need one single path, there might still be a couple more steps.

If you have an SVG file of this image, which we can look at, we can tell you specifically how to get the outline path. (But again, we can really only help with Inkscape. Unless someone who knows AI happens to read this.)

If you're just starting out with cutting soft and hardware, you can find some beginner tutorials in this forum. It's not very active anymore, but a couple of us are still answering questions there. We keep it alive because of the great tutorials it contains. https://www.inkscapecuttingdesign.com/smf/index.php

Here, the very first topic in the Beginners Tutorials board! https://www.inkscapecuttingdesign.com/s ... pic=1301.0