I need to change the canvas color. I have a default white canvas with gridlines, but I am working on white and yellow objects that I want on a transparent background. I can't see anything. I could, of course, create a shape with a dark fill but this seems really hacky. What is the proper solution, please?

TIA for any help.

Dave

Open the document's properties panel (Shift+Ctrl+D),
and set a colour without an alpha value.
If your design is not extreme big, it will work fine.

You can change a whole bunch of stuff, including the canvas color by making a new template, then save it. Or, you can change the default template and it will open with the colored background each time. You can change all sorts of stuff on any of your templates, the size of your canvas, the shading/border, pixels or inches, # of layers upon opening, size, zoom, and more. I have several updated templates.
You can search the posts on this site, use something like 'change default template', to find specifics of which inkscape file to update, how to find it in the inkscape prgm, etc. And, if you get stumped, come back and let us know where you get stumped.

I think that what Lazur above told you works for your current canvas, but it won't change the color each time. You have that choice, you can create a new default template, or make a new one with the colored background and use it only when you want that color canvas.
Another example is that some people want that standard checkerboard canvas, and you can make your own template for that too.

I'm having trouble changing the canvas colour using this method. I can select a background colour through document properties, and the required colour will change in the document properties window, but nothing actually changes on the image?

This sounds like something that should be really straightforward and simple, but I just can't get this to work.

I'm using Windows 10, if that makes any difference?

It sounds like you might have changed the color, but not the alpha value. So in other words, it's still transparent. Open the same dialog again and look for a bar labelled "A". Slide that from the far left side to the far right side. Or change the value in the spinbox to 255.

If you still can't change it, we might need to look at the SVG file. There could be some kind of misunderstanding. If you want us to look at the file, you can attach it to your next message, if you use the full editor (and not Quick Reply).

If you don't want to share the SVG file, we could make some guesses about what might be wrong. But the fastest and easiest way is for us to just look at the file.

Thanks Brynn

I'm away from a PC I use for Inkscape, so will look at this later when I'm at home.

I'm having the same problem: I'm working on an image with transparent background. Eventually I want to use this image in another application on a dark background (think: white text). So I want to set the background transparent and the canvas dark. As far as I can see the background of the workspace always reverts to white when I set the alpha to zero. What I'd need is to set the background color of the workspace independent of the alpha. Otherwise I have to adjust the background setting whenever I export the image.

Here is background with transparent alpha, but black "canvas". Opened in Gimp (active window), shows alpha intact...


Does this help?

Would also add the note that since 0.92 you can set a checkerboard background.