Whether you’re an advanced Inkscape user or a beginner, I’m sure we’ve all had the privilege of saying, “Oh no, what did I just do?”. From accidentally hiding a toolbar or deleting something, let’s go over 5 common Inkscape issues and how to fix them.

1. Detaching Fill and Stroke

I’ve certainly done this more than my fair share of times. You’re clicking away and all of a sudden, the Fill and Stroke menu flies across the screen and turns into a separate window. Great. Now, before you go ahead and reinstall Inkscape, you’ll be happy to know this is super easy to fix.

It’s as simple as dragging the top of the Fill and Stroke window back into it’s rightful place. The issue is: there’s two tops on this window. Look at the image below as I have selected the correct place to click and drag your Fill and Stroke menu back into place.

2. Disappearing Toolbars and Scrollbars

Whether you’re setting up your Inkscape to your liking, or you’ve accidentally removed a toolbar, here’s how to get them back.

Head up to View > Show/Hide to show or hide all of the main menus and toolbars.

3. Lost in Groups

Perhaps you have a super elaborate design where you’ve been grouping things left and right. Well, when you have to go into those groups to edit them, you may find yourself getting lost and accidentally drawing objects into wrong groups or something.

If you go to the bottom of Inkscape, you’ll find a nifty little Layers drop-down menu. You can easily sift in and out of groups here, or get back to the main layer.

4. Adjusting Fill Gradient with Stroke Gradient

You’ll notice when you apply a gradient on both the Fill and the Stroke, using the Gradient Tool to adjust the gradients independently becomes almost impossible because the gradient lines merge if they’re too close.

A couple options (that took me way too long to notice) can be found on the top left of Inkscape when you have the Gradient Tool selected. You can use these to separate your gradients by clicking either “Create gradient in the Fill” or “Create gradient in the Stroke” and then drawing your gradient lines independently.

5. Resetting Object Parameters

When drawing rectangles, ellipses, or polygons, each one has it’s unique parameters (located in the top toolbar). Now when you change these parameters, every shape you draw will retain those options - and that may not be what you want.

There’s a nice little button on each of these toolbars that resets some of these parameters. These are just the main 3, but other Tools also have buttons to reset parameters.

All Done!

There we go! 5 common Inkscape problems each with a relatively easy fix. Hopefully this helps you down the road. Thanks for reading!