I’m a novice at Inkscape and I’m trying to teach myself how to use it. TWO ISSUES: I created a simple image with text and an object that I’m trying to save as a PNG file with a transparent background. I can’t get the background to be transparent. Secondly, I don’t know how to crop the image so that when I save it, it doesn’t save the whole canvas as part of the image. I tried copying and pasting the grouped text/objects into GIMP, but I still can’t get the background to be transparent. Any advice?

The default Inkscape bg is transparent. Are you using the Export bitmap option or Save as Cairo png? Don't use Cairo PNG.

When exporting you can choose between Page, Drawing and selected areas (or use a custom one).

Great, thanks. That was easy enough!

Hi,

Thanks for this info.

But (serious question), is there any reason why it would make sense that saving as a PNG will include the supposedly transparent background and make it white?

Thanks again.

Maybe because it's impossible to draw over the annoying checkboard pattern, and still be able to see what you're doing?

Actually I have no idea why it is, but I do MUCH prefer it, personally. But I think the bottom line is that vector graphics is just completely different from raster graphics, and there's a lot that one must get used to doing differently, when taking up vector graphics.

Older versions of IE don't support PNG transparency so this might be a reason to export opaque images.

alanthonyc wrote:(…) is there any reason why it would make sense that saving as a PNG will include the supposedly transparent background and make it white?

Quoting from a recent discussion in inkscape-devel:

Ted Gould wrote:it was for testing the Cairo output. It was part of the GSoC project to do PDF output, and was easy enough to add, so we left it in for testing Cairo rendering.