This seems like a good opportunity to ask, is there a clear way to export an svg from inkscape for the web? In a lot of applications (for instance with logos on the web) you want to be able to make a selection, reduce it down to a single path represented by a single d attribute, and then be able to copy that off, or save as a file. I did manage to do it by fiddling around by combining/intersecting different shapes, until the output svg got into the right form, then normalizing that with an online tool. But is there a way to do this more easily in Inkscape?
Ideally you could make a selection, and then go to file > export for web, and get a graphical dialogue to allow you to play around with viewBox and other display attributes. Or is there another open-source program that handles this well? Now that SVG seems to be becoming more and more a first class part of the web, this kind of thing would be very useful.
It's even simpler than that. Ctrl-A (select all), Ctrl-K (Path->Combine).
The catch is that if you're using objects, they will be converted to paths (curves) and you'll lose useful things like fill, rounded corners, gradients... If you think about it, what you're asking only makes sense for very simple drawings - only those can be represented by a single path.
Ah, thanks for confirming, pretty certain that is what I ended up doing. If I recall, this did still have other issues, for instance handling scaling and origin was difficult, and also I think all the points had 10 decimal places unnecessarily. I needed to use web tools to get it into the right shape, although part of this may be that I was getting my head around the difficulties of how SVG works on the web, using viewBox rather than height/width attributes and so on.
Ideally you could make a selection, and then go to file > export for web, and get a graphical dialogue to allow you to play around with viewBox and other display attributes. Or is there another open-source program that handles this well? Now that SVG seems to be becoming more and more a first class part of the web, this kind of thing would be very useful.