You offset a path inside or outside, then expand. The closest Inkscape has to expanding is converting an LPE effect into a path. There is no Expand in Inkscape, because it doesnt need to.Īs far as i understand expanding means vectorizing or finalizing a filter effect. Thank you in advance to anyone who can help me out! Can't figure out how to do it without deleting my red fill in the process. I have some red text with a blue stroke outline. I can't seem to find how to do this in Inkscape.

In Illustrator all I had to do was use the expand function and it would convert my text to a shape and then convert my strokes to fills. I feel like I must be missing something that should be very obvious. I have searched the internet for over an hour and have not been able to find an answer to my simple question, nor have I been able to find anyone asking this question, which surprises me because it's a very basic function that I use every single day in illustrator. I am entirely baffled as to why you would want it to automatically delete your fill but I am still trying to figure out how to do this properly. I thought I must have done something wrong, or it must be a bug, so I went searching online and found that this is apparently what it is supposed to do.

So thinking logically, I then went to 'Stroke to Path' and I was shocked to see that while it did accomplish the job of expanding my stroke to a fill, it deleted my original fill! So in other words I was left with only the expanded stroke. All it seems to do is convert text objects to shapes, which is good because I needed that but the stroke was still a stroke and not a shape. I quickly found the 'object to path' function and used it, but it did not expand my stroke.

So I am coming from Illustrator trying to learn how to use inkscape as an alternative, and everything was going fine until I went to 'expand' (I guess this is an Illustrator term) my object.

Inkscape font to shape