Circle or ellipse is invisible

[Lawrence]

Just downloaded Inkscape 0.46+devel r21271, built May 1 2009 and created a circle but the circle is invisible! The tiny markers, two squares and a circle, are visible but not the circle. I checked that the opacity is 100% and that the fill and stroke are black. This happens in release 21210 also but I had done more work in that release and did not know if I had changed some setting.

It does seem that I changed something because the problem newly showed up in 0.46 which had installed a long time ago. The problem went away when I created a square, black fill and stroke. But I do not know how or why the problem was caused and am concerned that others will fall into the same situation.

This seems to be related to https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/210109 but that bug is marked as low priority and drawing circles seems important to me.

[nightrow (jb-benoit)]

Just check that you are not in "outline" display mode.

[Thomas Hicks (hicks-kingtom)]

Hi had a look at the svg, and nothing seems to be wrong with that, as it displays fine in my inkscape, and nothing appearers wrong with the svg (+bug 210109 is unrelated).

In outline mode you should be able to all the objects, but outlined so can't be that.

Some quick questions:
1) related to above: Have you tried switching to outline mode to see if they appear in your build?

2)Have you tried looking at the the layers dialoge and making sure that they are all shown + opacity not set to 0?

3)Does it only affect circles, or are other objects also not being displayed?

4)Have you tried deleting your preferences/inkscape profile, as these are not normally deleted when you upgrade?

it also seems strange that the option markers are appearing but not the selection box...

[Lawrence (annon0m0s)]

hi,
The problem was in my preferences file and it has been resolved. Thanks everyone.
Found the problem in my preferences.xml and resolved the problem by comparing current file to a backup from a few days ago. In the preferences.xml there were these lines, many lines cut out just to show a bit of context:
<group
     id="tools"
     bounding_box="geometric"
     style="fill:none;stroke:black;stroke-opacity:1;stroke-width:1px;stroke-linejoin:miter;stroke-linecap:butt;">
<group
       id="shapes"
       style="fill-rule:evenodd;"
       selcue="1"
<eventcontext
         id="arc"
         style="color:#000000;fill:#000000;fill-opacity:1;fill-rule:nonzero;stroke:#000000;stroke-width:1;stroke-linecap:butt;stroke-linejoin:miter;stroke-miterlimit:4;stroke-opacity:1;stroke-dasharray:none;stroke-dashoffset:0;marker:none;marker-start:none;marker-mid:none;marker-end:none;visibility:visible;display:inline;overflow:visible;enable-background:accumulate"
         end="2.8302839e-12"
         start="2.2979501e-13"
         usecurrent="1" />

The start and end of the arc are very small numbers e-12 and e-13. If those lines are replaced with end=0 start=0 the problem goes away. It seems as if instead of creating a circle a very small arc was being created.

Switching to outline did not help. The layer was not locked. Opacity was 100%. Spirals were invisible but could be changed to visible by changing the fill and stroke but the circles changing the colour of the circles did nothing because they were actually very tiny arcs.

@Thomas Hicks: Thanks for noticing that the selection box was not showing. I had really thought that uploading a screen print of an invisible object was a stupid idea but should be done to show that I was "not imagining" an invisible object. You saw the image and noticed that something else was missing. Problems which have a quirk where something is missing catch my interest because it means that "nothing", the missing piece, is of more significance than something, the pieces that are there. It is always so difficult to notice, that is see, the "nothing". Almost wonder if that is a Zen thing.

Thanks again everyone.

[Lawrence (annon0m0s)]

Hi,
What should I do to change the status of this bug to be closed? There is a status of invalid but does that mean ignore this to others?
Thanks.

[nightrow (jb-benoit)]

i think you just asked to invalid your repport, so here i go.

[Ettelen (ettelen)]

Hi everyone,
I have just encountered the same bug. Squares and Circles shapes became invisible for no reason.

But deleting preferences.xml and re-launching Inkscape worked fine for fixing that. Hope this helps.

[su_v (suv-lp)]

1) There have been more reports of this happening. See bug #459811 for the most recent discussion of the broken 'sticky arc controls'. -> re-opening as 'Confirmed'
2) It is unclear how or when these start/end values are written to the "arc" event context preferences, but they can't be re-set from within the GUI -> raising importance to 'Medium'