When I do get both stroke and fill, it seems that the transparency of one has to be the same transparency as that of the other. They both change together.

It looks like nobody has picked up on this statement, so I'll try to explain what's probably happening:

There are lots of ways to make things invisible in Inkscape. It's one of the most common problems for new users, as it's not always obvious how to make things visible again if you don't really know how you made them invisible in the first place.

One way of losing things is to make them transparent. But there are various ways to make them transparent, depending on what exactly you want to achieve. These are the main ones:

1) You can make whole layers transparent. This isn't a common problem, but can happen.

2) You can make groups of objects transparent by adjusting their opacity setting in the Fill & Stroke dialog, or via the "O:" menu at the left of the status bar below the drawing window.

3) You can make individual objects transparent in the same way.

4) You can make the fill or stroke transparent independently of one another by adjusting the "A" slider ("Alpha") in the Fill & Stroke dialogue.

To answer your problem, they're both changing together because you're adjusting the opacity of the whole object. To adjust the fill or stroke separately, use the "A" slider just below the colour sliders in the Fill & Stroke dialog.

A lot of these sort of issues are covered in the first few instalments of my tutorial series from Full Circle Magazine. They're all free to download, more information here: http://www.inkscapeforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=11981

Mark

 

On Mon, Mar 7, 2016 at 10:03 PM, John Sampson <jrs.idx@...3210...> wrote:

Hello -

I have been experimenting and finding pretty unpredictable behaviour. At
one point I was able to get a rectangle
with "stroke" that worked, but mostly making selections in "Fill and
stroke", tab "Stroke paint" and "Stroke style", does nothing. When I do
get both stroke and fill, it seems that the transparency of one has to
be the same transparency as that of the other. They both change
together. If I de-select the rectangle so that the dotted lines
indicating selection do not obscure the stroke (if any), the rectangle
is apt to vanish altogether from the scene never to be found again.

I do not want to separate the lines I described - I was only describing
them separately to try to make it clearer what I wanted to see - a
rectangle with no, or transparent, fill, and a visible stroke - a line
surrounding the rectangle as one would see if drawing on paper with a
pencil. Perhaps that is what I should do - doing it on a computer is
insane to start with - I will go more insane if I go on with this much
longer.

Regards

John S.

On 07/03/2016 21:05, Carl Symons wrote:
> On Monday, March 7, 2016 8:32:09 PM PST John Sampson wrote:
>> Hello -
>>
>> What I want is two horizontal parallel lines of the same length, one
>> vertically above the other, connected at the
>> ends with two vertical parallel lines of the same length, thus tracing a
>> rectangle. I would have thought the route
>> to this appearance would be via the rectangle object.
> Draw a rectangle with the rectangle tool
> open "Fill and Stroke" in the object menu selection (ctrl+shift+F)
> set fill to none; set stroke to whatever you want for the line appearance
>
> select rectangle with the arrow (left toolbar)
> in the path menu selection, select object to path
>
> change tool selector to edit paths by node (left toolbar)
> select all corners of the rectangle
> click on the icon (below the menu) that shows one node separating into 2 nodes
> The four corner nodes will change appearance
>
> With the entire rectangle selected
> in the path menu selection, click on "break apart"
>
> result is four separate lines as you have described
>
>
>
>> I managed to make the palette appear, but the manoeuvres you recommend
>> have no effect. Thank you for trying to help me, though.
>>
>> Regards
>>
>> John S.
>>
>> On 07/03/2016 18:05, Arlo Barnes wrote:
>>> Can you describe a little more what you want in the end? Right now it
>>> sounds like you want the outline of a rectangle with nothing in the
>>> inside. That can be achieved by setting the stroke to a colour and the
>>> fill to nothing, which can be accomplished in the bottom left corner
>>> of the screen (there are a row of squares of different colours plus a
>>> white one with a red X through it signaling no colour, which can be
>>> clicked on to set the fill of a selected object or shift-clicked to
>>> set the stroke, the results of which will be shown on the object and
>>> also on two other rectangles in the bottom left) or by using the
>>> window brought up by pressing the key combo Control-Shift-F.
>>> -Arlo James Barnes
>>>