Hi,

I often end updrawing my own patterns that contain complex grouped objects in some form of repeated tiling. This quickly leads to enormous files, and frequently Inkscape crashing.

My solution is generally to create the pattern in it's own file (away from anything else at all that would consume memory) and gently nurse it into exeistance - export to PNG - import into gimp and manually resize/fit to whatever I'm wanting to pattern - scale it down - export to re-import into Inkscape for use.

I'm sure there's a better way than the above though! - ?

I've seen comments that saving as non-insckape svg flattens images but I haven't seen any change in behaviour/file size doing so.

I'm not sure if I follow your process.

You draw a pattern
Export to PNG
Open in GIMP
Resize
Scale
Export
Import back to Inkscape

Is the resize and scale the same thing? Because generally, scaling is about the same thing as resizing.

It sounds like the only purpose of GIMP is to resize/scale it. And undoubtedly, exporting as PNG loses a little bit of quality, scaling in GIMP loses a little more, exporting from GIMP loses a little more. So by the time it gets back into Inkscape, it must have lost some noticeable quality!

Why not draw it the size you want, to begin with, in Inkscape? You realize you can zoom in Inkscape, right? So if something is too small to see, you can zoom in to work on it. Or if it's too large, somehow, you can zoom out.

Or do you mean that exporting to PNG makes it much smaller file size. If that's the case, you could draw it the right size in Inkscape, then either export to PNG, or Save a Bitmap Copy from Inkscape, then import back to Inkscape. GIMP not needed. Unless I still don't understand.

I think it would help to see an example, to understand your process, and why you do it.

Edit
I'm not sure what you mean be "flatten". I think that's generally a term used in raster graphics, which at least partly means to move all layers into 1. But I'm not really sure about that. Here's some info about Inkscape SVG vs Plain SVG: https://inkscape.org/en/learn/faq/#What ... ain_SVG%22?

If you have a shape in a repeated tiling pattern that causes the file size to be too big, does an Edit-> Clone of the object to be tiled reduce the file size?

Edit: I just tested it:
I drew an object with lots of nodes and saved it. File size was 20 KB
I copy and pasted the object 50 times and saved the file. File size was 900 KB
I cloned the original object 50 times and saved the file. File size was 31 KB

File size is not everything.

Try vacuuming defs/clean file. Unused defs are often causing crashes and lagging.
In 0.48 grouped-clipped objects converted to patterns had rendering issues, maybe there is a way to simplify the base tile itself.

Can you share a sample of your work?

sample of what you call a complex pattern ?