Inkscape

finding and deleting Empty flowed text elements

Asked by sachit

When I accidentally create empty flowed text elements, there seems to be no way of finding and deleting them. This causes the image to render badly on renderers like eog/nautilus. Though this is a problem with the libsvg of linux, as a matter of principle (and practicality) I would like to be able to detect and manipulate invisible objects on Inkscape itself.

Barring tabbing through all the objects and seeing if they are required or deleting sections till it renders well, is there any method of showing all hidden/ empty/ invisible objects in an svg?

thanks

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su_v (suv-lp) said : 		#1

1) Avoid creating 'Flowed text' objects unless _really_ needed:
Inkscape's 'Flowed text' implementation is not supported by other SVG renderers (it was based on an early draft for SVG 1.2 which was later dropped):
<http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/FAQ#What_about_flowed_text.3F>
<http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/Text-Creating.html#Text-Enter-Regular>
(Hint: do not click-drag with the text tool, a single click is sufficient in most use cases for texts created in Inkscape).

2) Empty flowed text regions cannot be selected with the mouse nor visualized on-canvas in Inkscape ('View > Display mode > Outline' does not help): This known issue is tracked in
Bug #485269 “Invisible and unselectable flow region in image”
<https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/485269>

3) Empty or invisible flowed text objects cannot be 'batch-'converted [*] to regular text either (fails with "The flowed text(s) must be visible to be converted").
[*] you can select all 'Flowed Text' objects in the current document (or layer) with 'Edit > Find…' (search for "flowRoot" in the 'ID' field), and then apply 'Text > Convert to text' to the resulting selection.

A workaround for item 3:
1. Select all visible objects in the current layer (draw a selection frame around all objects) and move them to a new layer.
2. Deselect all
3. Make the previous layer current again, select all with 'Ctrl+A' (includes invisible objects), and delete the resulting selection ('Del', or 'Backspace').

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