Splitting and Joining


You can join different vector layers in a single layer. As you can read in the chapter about Vectors, a Vector layer can contain an arbitrary number of subpaths. The act of splitting a Vector layer creates a new Vector layer for each subpath in the original vector. Joining vectors does the reverse: it creates one vector layer with all selected layers as subpaths. 


Boolean Operations

It might seem not be clear what the difference between joining and boolean operations is. Boolean operations work on two shapes and combine both layers into a single shape. The combination will result in new or different points and possible some subpaths. In contrast, Splitting and Joining is a non-destructive way to combine vectors however its not possible to get the same results compared to boolean operations.