I am new to inkscape, and I found a video tutorial about creating a rotating arrow. When a circle is drawn there is nothing in the middle so when the path is broken at the nodes the circle breaks apart, when I do it, it is a mess. How do I get a hole in the middle of my circle so I can do this, or is there a way to remove the nodes so I can break the path at the nodes?

Hi.

Must have been a bad tutorial since it did not explain how to do it!

There are a lot of ways to create a 'doughnut' and circular arrow, here are one;
- make two circles inside each other - select the two and do a Path Difference. ( CTRL - )
- To delete a 'wedge'; Place a triangle on top of 'doughnut', select both and do a path difference again.
- select the two end nodes of the ring and perform 'Add Nodes' - twice,
- move three of the nodes to make an 'arrowhead'. Adjust to your liking.
See example;



Chime back if you need more help.
RHDS
Ragnar

I downloaded your svg and wondering how did you make the first two circles.*
Not on a locked layer, not locked objects, no paths but ellipses, except there are no ellipse handles appearing but they are not even clones;
while the fill attribute is off and the xml editor is showing a text-decoration:none style attribute, but there is no text on path effect or such.
And cx and cy is described twice.


*Other parts were more confusing with steps, and the fact you used arrow markers to show how to draw arrows felt also a little strange.

Hi

Lazur; interesting question. I used the 'Circles, ellipses and arcs' (F5) - tool to draw the first two circles.
I thought the 'text-attributes' was 'leftover' from me creating text and used the 'Last used style' setting
in the preferences - Shapes - Ellipse but even after clearing all the attributes and setting the
preferences to 'Own style' and getting the style from the cleared object the text attributes will be back
when drawing a new circle. Might be a 'new feature' in the newer versions of Inkscape?
I am using Inkscape 0.48+devel r13425 at the moment.
I don't see the double CX, CY in my XML editor. I created the image on my default A4 pagesize and
scaled it down to better fit in the browser window.

The 'sketch' was 'quick n dirty' - two minutes job - just to illustrate my text (a picture is worth a thousand words)
and I never intended it to be a full-blown tutorial - the arrows was just to indicate the sequence of steps - I used
the quickest way I know to make the arrows.

RGDS
Ragnar

Hi.

Update;
Just tested the 'official' version - the 'text attributes' are gone
but the strange thing is that when I then switch back to the deverlopers
version they are still gone, weird!

RGDS
Ragnar

Status bar IDs the objects as Circles, which does not exist in the stable version. So maybe it's something in the specific dev version that you had when you drew the image.

When you opened it in the stable version ("official"), perhaps the SVG/XML had to be altered, since something about a "Circle" doesn't exist in the stable version. Then when you opened again in dev version, those changes remain?

That's my extremely layperson explanation! (as well as guess!)

Hi.

Brynn - I like your way of reasoning!

My status bar still reports - Ellipse in the dev version 13425 - Where did you get the 'Circle'?
I did not open it again in the dev version but made a new circle in a blank document.
I got no explanation for this (yet) - it will need some more investigation! (and 'brainpower' - which I lack!)

RGDS
Ragnar

brynn wrote:Status bar IDs the objects as Circles, which does not exist in the stable version.

A-ha!
So that was it.
It should be similar to the path vs. line objects -as far as I know only the connector tool creates line objects in inkscape.

ragstian wrote:and 'brainpower' - which I lack!

Oh come on! You are one of the most engineer type of inkscaper I know of, with ALOT of brainpower.