Quoth Ed Ward on or about 2004-07-14:
I have an image that I'm drawing to show the tying of an overhand knot. www.slackliners.com. I'm trying to get the direction arrow to be on top of one part of the image and under the next (image 2). I ended up cutting the arrow in two and it looks like a whole image. The rope (image 3) is a different story. I tried the same cheat but obviously it didn't work. Any tips or commands to re join, or have different parts of images at different levels?? What about when the "ropes" cross being able to cut out the cross lines so it looks like the one side is under the other??
There's not much you can do; because of the way SVG (well, XML really) were designed, the object stack is pretty strictly structured. There are kluges to work around it, as you've shown. Mostly it involves 1) *very* careful diagram design; and 2) using the boolean operators a lot.
I've bashed up a general description of how I skirt around this problem, although I try to avoid using it since it's not reversible. AFAICT it's essentially the same as what you've done.
http://yoyo.its.monash.edu.au/~trent/img/interlocking.svg
-trent