recently I have made a couple of party invites, and to save time in the future (well it might be a net saving if I do thousands), I have created a couple of templates to help printing e.g. 6 invites to a page. To do this I have used clones of the single invite and positioned them on the page. However, I kept on forgetting to enter the group to do my editing, so some stuff wouldn't appearer on all the copies .

This lead me to realise that in Inkscape, layers are simply another group so why not just clone a whole layer?
unfortunately, you cannot select layers in that way in Inkscape without going to the XML editor... This bit is a bit technical! simply create all the clones on another layer, then edit their xlink attribute to refraction the id of the layer you want to clone, then lock the layer containing the copies to prevent them being moved...

I then thought, why not make a Kaleidoscope with all this knowledge... or at least a simple mirror image thing! so check out:
http://openclipart.org/people/tom/tom_4 ... mmetry.svg
for one you can download and use without doing the xml editing stuff!

Hey, this is fun!!

You know, I read this topic back when it was posted, but couldn't get the image to edit in Inkscape. But today, I figured it out, so I'm having fun with it. I really can't follow how you created this, as far as clones of layers, but I guess it's like a template, right? So I'm stuck on changing the size of the image and/or moving the image borders. Here's a screen shot of where I am:

You can see that I've tried to increase the Width from 744 and change, to 1000px. But that extends the border to the right, leaving part of the left side of the image outside the border. And I don't know of any way to move the image borders.

I did try Fit Page to Selection, but lost parts of the image. Is there any way for users of your template to enlarge (or reduce) the page size? Or is that one drawback of this template -- that users are confined to the page borders you set?

And also, while I'm asking questions, I turned on a rectangular grid, to help keep things quite symmetrical, but the grid didn't align with your guides. I guess there might be a certain setting for the grid, that corresponds to your guides. And I think I may have changed my default grid size. So I'm wondering if there's a certain grid setting or size that should correspond with your guides, what is it?

Thanks for this fun template, and thanks for your help with my problem

Yes, It has been a long time since creating this, lets hope I can remember enough to give a proper reply .

If I remember correctly, changing the size of the image can be problematic (as you have found, I think it was to-do with making clones of the active layer). There are a couple of work arounds, though most lose the ability to easily edit the image again...

The first option is to create the image ignoring the size of the page, then do a save as -> Plane SVG. Reopen in Inkscape and it behaves like a normal SVG file.

The second option is to use the pre-release version (soon to be released) 0.47, here it seems to work better. Unlock the copies layer, select all, then do the fit page borders to selection.

Note that it is unfortunately impossible (or at least more effort than it is worth) to change the page boundary by editing the height and width fields. It works, but the clones positions don't get updated so that it is no longer centred on the page (something like adding a pixel border on only two sides of a bitmap image).

Hope that helps, tomh (note that I had the same problems when I made these: http://openclipart.org/media/tags/kaleidoscope ) Have fun!

Thanks tom,
Yeah, that's fine, because I only use Fit Page to Selection, as my final step in finishing an image. So I won't need to edit any further after that. Although technically, one still can edit (after Save As Plain SVG), but not as the same template sort of file. It just edits as a regular image in Inkscape.

Thanks again -- I really do enjoy this!