|  |  | 4.4 Stroke and fill colors

## 4.4 Stroke and fill colors

Most Ipe objects can have two different colors, one for the boundary and one for the interior of the object. The Postscript terms stroke and fill are used to denote these two colors. They can be selected independently in the Color toolbar. You can also set stroke and fill to be void. A void stroke color means that no outline of the object is drawn, a void fill color means that no interior will be drawn. Setting both colors to void will render an object invisible. Imagine preparing a drawing by hand, using a pen and black ink. What Ipe draws in its stroke color is what you would stroke in black ink with your pen. Probably you would not use your pen to fill objects, but you would use a brush, and maybe even a different kind of paint like water color. Well, the fill color is Ipe's "brush".

This explains why text objects, mark objects, and arrows only use the stroke color, even for the filled marks (discs and squares) and filled arrows. You would also use a pen for these details, not the brush (unless you draw very large marks--in which case you probably meant to draw a filled circle anyway).

An interesting exception to the above rules are lines with arrows. If a line with an arrow has stroke color void, the arrow will be drawn with the fill color, and the line will not be drawn at all. This is useful to create arrowheads without body, which can be used to be attached to objects that cannot have arrows.

|  |  | 4.4 Stroke and fill colors