Are you using 0.46? This seems to be a bug in 0.46 - with Inkscape 0.47pre1 (on OS X 10.5.7) it works as expected - I'll attach the shrinked svg. You are right! I upgraded to 0.47 (which was easy in Fedora using the "updates-testing" repository) and then things worked exactly as you said....

There is an invisible rectangle (no fill, undefined stroke) with the size of the page, that prevents the size change. Reopen the drawing, use Shift + TAB to select the rectangle, re-size or delete it and then try again to shrink the page size via Document Properties. Thank you for your help, but fo...

Select everything before bringing up the Doc Properties, and then "Fit page to selection". If you want to make the page slightly bigger than the bounding boxes of the selected items, make a square temporarily, size it around the rest of the drawing how you want the page to boarder to be, ...

How do I get the page box to fit snugly round my drawing? I tried Doc Properties -> Page but when I changed the width and height in "custom size" it just rescaled my drawing along with the page. I want to be able to export to a .png or .pdf that doesn't have a lot of extra white space arou...