Fast Path operations with the Shape Builder tool
There’s a brand-new tool on the block at the time of writing this book. Inkscape 1.3 includes the much anticipated Shape Builder tool and, indeed, it is an excellent time-saver when building shapes that would otherwise take many different shape operations.
Shape Builder is a simple tool for making complex shapes. It’s built on the idea of selecting the parts you want to keep out of overlapping shapes. Figure 6.26 shows three overlapping black-filled circles, each set to 20% opacity so that you can see the overlapping parts.
Now, say we just want some of the overlapping shapes and not others. By selecting the three circles, and switching to the Shape Builder tool, we can simply click the shapes we want and hit the Enter/Return key to end up with just those chosen shapes with all others removed, as shown in Figure 6.28:
Figure 6.28 – Using the Shape Builder tool on three circles
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