Remove/Cut Section from Image

Question

I'm attempting to remove (or cut) a portion out of a shape. The result of my operations are that the removed portion automatically is given the same border as the other shape before the "cut". Here are the steps that I took to achieve this:

1. Create a number (42)
2. Define Stroke with width 3px
3. Path -> Stroke to Path
4. Define Stroke with width .5px
5. Remove Fill Create Shape (I created a hexagon with a defined fill)
6. Place the number on the shape
7. Path - Difference

The hexagon on the left is a result of the Difference operation. The one on the right is me simply placing the number on the hexgaon with a solid white background. How do I "cut" the number from the hexagon and preserve the border of the number?

Answer 1

Whenever we perform boolean operations on two objects a single new object will be created. This new object will have it's own properties for fill and stroke on the whole object (left side in the image below). There is no object having different fill and stroke properties from the inside or the outside.

To overcome this in the example given I worked with the path difference operator on two different objects.

I simply duplicated the source object and then removed the fill for stroke only on one of both, the second object was a fill only object, stroke was removed (Illustrated on the right side below with a shift in one object to better see what I did).

Path difference was then done on the fill-only object.