Grateful thanks to both of you. Putting the pattern over the coloured object is doing just what I wanted. I must now have a go at creating a pattern with grouped foreground and background, though it sounds from what you say about the gaps between tiles as though I'll probably stick to pattern over c...

Inkscape's patterns include "Ermine", and this is the heraldic symbol for ermine in black on a white ground. It is easy to change the colour of the black spots, but is there any way to change the colour of the white background? (I've also created an ermine fill of my own and added it to Pa...

Thanks to both of you for really full and helpful replies -- I'm very grateful indeed.

Thanks, Lazur. That's exactly what I wanted. I did look at the idea of clipping, but saw that it doesn't actually remove what is outside the frame but just covers it up, so I thought a pattern would be better (and I could also put it into my patterns file for the future). But if I can trouble you fu...

I've started using Inkscape for simple heraldry and have come up against a problem with patterns. I have managed to create a pattern for ermine that does a fill as I wish (instead of the installed one which is both too crowded for me and non-staggered), and that works well. But I can't seem to get t...

Nothing doing, I fear, so it's going to be a question of dealing with things one by one as they shew up. But as one who had no familiarity at all with svg "under the hood" until these last days I've found a question that I wonder if anyone could answer for me. As I wrote, the file I'm deal...

Thanks for the further suggestions. Ctrl and A, Ctrl and numerical +, Ctrl and K seemed to work for the first two stages, but then reverted in the third. Ctrl and L works, but needs the problem items to be identified first -- and that is the problem. There are just short of 700 of these items and th...

Hi! Yes, that's exactly what I thought you meant, and that would be very helpful indeed in identifying the problem items. My difficulty with it is (and (I've just had another try) that "Object to Marker" is not creating a custom marker for me, even after I've tried putting another marker f...

Thanks once again. I'm finding problems in creating a new marker (despite what you say in your last line and what is in the Manual), so this is going to need some time to experiment a little further. (I've also tried various ways of doing Find & Replace by opening the file in a text-editor, but ...

May I come back with a follow-up? I want to try and find the 5-node objects. Can I search by node-count, and if so, what is the expression (I have been unable to find it)? "stroke-miterlimit" and "stroke-width" as suggested don't work because absolutely the only difference betwee...

posting.php?mode=reply&f=5&t=18648#You're absolutely right -- I should have been looking for 4.99990416px and not 4.257 pt! Thank you very much indeed.

I have a number of text-items in font-size 4.257 pt (no, I didn't choose anything so odd -- it's the result of reading a file exported from another program). I'd like to select them all so as to be able to change to my standard 4 pt for that sort of entry. But I can't seem to manage to get "Fin...

I did a clean and the document came down from 2 MB to 1.8 MB. On opening Inkscape and with no document open it uses 103 MB memory. Opening the document bumped this up to 392 MB. At the end of that editing session I closed the document and the program load was 144 MB. Next session began at 103 MB aga...

That's fascinating! It opens in Corel as "sample.cdr". If I then save it to .svg, the result opens in Inkscape without problem. But all the problems with the original "sample.ai" remain. Out of curiosity I have just downloaded another free native .ai file from the web, and that o...

Thank you very much indeed -- that's really helpful.posting.php?mode=reply&f=5&t=18637#

Thanks for your help. There was no manual kerning in the cdr original, which is why I didn't think of trying that, but I followed your advice and it worked -- all the words now look as they should. Some word-spacing has now gone mad, but there are far fewer things there that will need manual editing...

Thank you very much for that. It makes me wonder how some but not all of these acquired the extra node! It would be a massive undertaking to edit them all separately, so I'll have to try and find a way of doing a Find & Replace to put in a new symbol for the whole lot. But that's by the way. How...

I'm working on a 2.2 MB file converted to svg from cdr (CorelDraw X7). The file is a map, and so has a lot of text. The font used in the original was Arial. In trying to work with the file and edit it further in Inkscape I have come up with two questions on which I should be very grateful for any he...

I'm working on a 2.2 MB file converted to svg from CorelDraw X7. The file is a railway map, and for the most part the conversion seems to have worked (though problems with text, about which I'll be writing a separate plea for help!). However, I used a small rectangle in CorelDraw to use across lines...

Thanks for that. I've just tried converting the smaller sample file to RGB, but that doesn't work. I'll have a go at zipping the file and seeing if it uploads that way.

Thanks for your comments. I'm afraid I can't post the file because "The extension ai is not allowed" . As I said, one of the two files is a sample from the web, and it opens fine in Corel Draw as explained above, but in Inkscape there's just a blank sheet (although with the correct title a...

I'm using Inkscape 0.91 64-bit under Windows 8.1 on a machine with 16 GB RAM. I understood that the program should be able to open .ai (Illustrator) files, but this does not seem to work for me. I have tried both an .ai file exported from Coral Draw and also a sample .ai file downloaded from the web...

Thanks -- I'll have a go at that. With clones I was referring -- inaccurately from memory -- to the command "Relink to Copied" as described in the Manual (Tavmjong Bah, 4th edition), page 138. That was what I couldn't get to work. Thanks for the advice on making changes via the xml editor....

Thank you. I hd tried the snap between bounding box centre and path, found that it consistently didn't seem to work, and assumed that I was doing something wrong. (Incidentally, I can't get re-link clones to selection to work either.) I'll certainly use your suggested hack in new work as it's very e...

Apologies if this seems a daft question, but it's one to which I haven't been able to find an answer anywhere. I'm working on a simple map of railways, with a plain background and coloured lines to represent the lines-of-route. To indicate stations I'm using small circular objects all cloned from on...