hi,

So i made a 96x96 selection to make a desktop icon. Its a peice of paper with a pencil writing on it. The peice of paper takes up about 80% of the selection and it is centered in the middle. The pencil hangs off of the right side of the paper and touches the boundary of the selection. I exported the image and the right side were the pencil hangs off of the paper is black. I just want the paper and penicl to show up with the pencil hanging off the side, no black. Also i punched a few holes in the paper, hoping that i would be able to see my desktop background through them like with many icons ive seen, but again these wholes turned black once i exported the image. It seems that saving the image as an Icon is actually what causes these areas to turn black, while having it saved as a PNG is fine. Anyone got any ideas here?

Welcome to InkscapeForum!

When you say you're saving it as an icon, what format (file extension) do you mean? If you mean ICO, Inkscape doesn't offer that, so you'd have to use some other program to get there. I'm confused also because sometimes you say you "exported" and sometimes you say "Saved As". If you're using Save As Cairo PNG, that's not the proper way to create a PNG image. Instead, you should use File menu > Export Bitmap.

If that's not the problem, then how did you "punch holes" in it? Maybe it's something to do with that?