Boolean ops with >2 operands should work on groups

[Luke-hutchison]

Group->Intersection etc. don't work if you try to
intersect one shape with a group of shapes.

[Peter Lewerin (vermeil-deactivatedaccount)]

Do you by any chance mean "Path/Intersection"?

If so, please clarify if you mean

 * intersect more than two path objects (which should work)
 * intersect a path object and a group object (which won't work; boolean operations work on paths only)
 * intersect a set of non-path objects (ditto)

[Luke-hutchison (luke-hutchison)]

I mean your second point. I imagine it would be quite easy to implement this, by simply iterating through all paths in a group, and intersecting each separately, but leaving the result in the same group hierarchy as the original. You could even intersect a group of objects with a group of objects, by first unioning all the objects in one group, and then intersecting with the objects in the other group.

You could also handle non-path objects by automatically converting to path before taking the intersection (optionally warning the user of what you're doing), or possibly by defining a clip mask rather than actually taking the intersection.

[qbit (paulix)]

The most annoying thing here is you may have a "fake group" (a single object or a single path grouped with itself = select object then Ctrl+G). In this case, you can try to apply any boolean operation without success and you have no idea why is not working until you read the status bar to see there is a "group" of a single object involved. I think at least should be displayed a warning. Other solution is to prevent the possibility to create groups with less than 2 objects.

Because of the "fake group" situation, I suggest to change the Importance of this issue from Wishlist to Medium.

[qbit (paulix)]

When meet the "fake group situation" the message in status bar is: "One of the objects is not a path, cannot perform the boolean operation." I think this is confusing because the words "is not a path" are not providing useful information. As result, the user tries to convert the objects to paths, but in the case of the object grouped with itself this is not working. In my opinion, this case is problematic enough to require a solution in this new 0.47 release.

[su_v (suv-lp)]

The status line always reveals the types of the selected objects (shape, path, group, clone, ...).

[Jonathan Hofinger (jhofinger)]

Hi, this issue has been reported to Gitlab: https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inbox/-/issues/2607

Closed by https://gitlab.com/jhofinger