Quick guide for creating borders using transparency

There are many ways to create borders around different objects in Inkscape. Potentially the 'easiest' is a sort of cheat if you will. We are going to use the rectangle tool and play with transparency to get what we want. Here is a step by step to follow along.

1. import your object (graph, figure, table, text, …) into Inkscape:
   

2. create a box around the object you want to give a border, we use the rectangle tool (you can draw over top of the thing you want to put a border around, we'll tidy up later):
   

3. we can now create a border around our box/rectangle using the stroke function:

• open 'Fill and Stroke' menu:
  

• click on the 'Stroke paint' option and then 'Flat colour', you should see a black border appear (feel free to play with colours here):
  

• the 'Stroke style' button opens a menu where you can edit how the line looks. By changing the 'width' option you change the tickness of the border:
  

4. you can change the colour and size of the stroke using the stroke menu as we have just seen above. Play around and get the look that you are after.

5. once happy with the border/stroke we can remove the fill in the box/rectangle making the shape transparent but retaining the border:

• go to the 'fill' menu:
  

• change the alpha opacity channel (the 'A' section in the below) from 100 (solid) to 0 (fully transparent):
  

6. we now have a 'border' that can be positioned and resized around the object that we want to give the border:

• I used the 'Align and distribute' menu to center the border around my figure:
  

7. to finish off we can select both the border and the object and 'group' them together, meaning that they will move and resize as one object:
   

The final product:

That's it, pretty straight forward and effective.