On Wed, 2008-07-09 at 14:39 -0400, john cliff wrote:

You should just be able to set a white fill on the tail shape, as long as you've drawn it as a V rather than 2 seperate lines.

2008/7/9 Caryn A. Tate <gunther17@...9...>: Hi,

    I have an issue with creating the tails on word balloons for a
    comic with Inkscape.  Keep in mind I'm a brand new user, so
    I'm sure the solution is a simple one.

    I use the ellipse tool to create the word balloons themselves,
    and I use the Bezier tool to create the "tails" to/from the
    balloons.  My problem is that I'm creating the word balloons
    and tails *on top of* art (utilizing the Layer tool), and I
    can't find a way to fill the tails solid with white, to
    prevent the artwork from showing through.  I understand how to
    fill the ellipses themselves and keep them solid, but the
    tails I can't seem to figure out.  Can someone help?  

    Also, I'm completely open to pointers, so if you do something
    differently than what I described, please let me know.

    Thanks in advance!

You can join them all together but shift+select and then Path->Union (Ctrl++) This way you don't have to get the tail to exact match to the ellipse; have it go into the ellipse. When you union them, it is automatically trim to the ellipse.

On Wed, Jul 9, 2008 at 2:55 PM, Terry Brown <terry_n_brown@...12...> wrote:

You could also try:

• draw an ellipse
• covert to a path (4 nodes)
• edit nodes
• select bottom and left or bottom and right node
• click add node button twice
• de-select all nodes
• drag one of the new nodes out to make the tail

Might be faster?

I don't know about faster, but that's a neat way of doing it. I had never thought of doing that. I just tried it and I can get some pretty neat tails off of it. The only difference is that I add 3 new nodes, make them all corner nodes, and then drag the middle one of the three downward to where i want it. You can then play with the node handles to get the shape you want.

Thanks for the tip.

RQ

On Wed, Jul 9, 2008 at 4:23 PM, Quentin Hartman <qhartman@...155...> wrote:

This is exactly the technique I use for creating that effect. Best one I've found so far.

Actually this is pretty quick. Once the ellipse is a path, you can just hit F2 (for the node tool), and click between two of the nodes (to select that path segment) and hit the AddNode button twice (which gives you three new nodes). Then you just drag one of them out.

The thing I like most about it is that I always end up messing up the curvature of the tail with the bezier tool. I'm just hamfisted when it comes to getting what I want first time out with the bezier tool, dragging that node out and adjusting the handles seems more natural to me. For me, this is better, but for others Shawn's suggestion would work just as well.

RQ

On Wed, 2008-07-09 at 15:24 -0400, Richard Querin wrote:

On Wed, Jul 9, 2008 at 2:55 PM, Terry Brown <terry_n_brown@...12...> wrote:

    You could also try:

    - draw an ellipse
    - covert to a path (4 nodes)
    - edit nodes
    - select bottom and left or bottom and right node
    - click add node button twice
    - de-select all nodes
    - drag one of the new nodes out to make the tail

    Might be faster?

I don't know about faster, but that's a neat way of doing it. I had never thought of doing that. I just tried it and I can get some pretty neat tails off of it. The only difference is that I add 3 new nodes, make them all corner nodes, and then drag the middle one of the three downward to where i want it. You can then play with the node handles to get the shape you want.

Thanks for the tip.

It is faster to draw the ellipse, draw the tail making sure it overlaps the ellipse, select both and then menu Path->Union