|  |  | 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. Stroke and fill color can be selected independently in the Properties window. 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). (But Ipe does obey the fill color for the "hollow" marks, that is marks of type circle and box, so that you can easily make bicolored marks.)

If you set the fill color to be void, no interior will be drawn, just the outline. To achieve the opposite (filling a path without drawing its outline, set the line style to void.

If you create a path with arrows, and set the line style to void, the arrows will be still be drawn with the stroke color. 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