Hi,

I am a biologist and am forced to use .svg files to compile larger figures of a paper but I don't manage to do what I want despite days of trials. I must add I have no knowledge about graphics unfortunately. So please forgive me if my wording is not very accurate

Here is the project. I have two DNA regions with arrows representing genes in these areas. The two DNA regions have been drawn in a software called sequence viewer and each exported as an .svg file. When I open each file individually, no problem, I can edit then as I wish but I need to create a file that has the two sequences inside the same image and I don't manage to "fuse" the two files.

If I open file 1 and then drop file 2 inside file 1, some colours are distorted, some items do not appear and worse, as soon as I degroup the image from file 1, image from file 2 disappears, at least partially ! This problem persists even if I create a second layer (Calque in French) to drop the second file. Similar problems arise if I open file 2 and rop file 1 or if I open a blank file and drop the two files inside.

I have no idea what else to try because I realize what I am trying to do should be extremely easy !

Thanks for reading me and I hope you can help me. Don't hesitate to ask if something is not clear and i'll try to explain better.

The problem could be that both files are naming the properties the same. For example, a gradient is given a name and that name can be supplied to different object so they get that gradient. Two different file can use the same name even though they look different. When you combine the two files you can't have two gradients with the same name, so one is overwritten--so whilst one file might have had a red gradient and the other a blue gradient, when you put them together they both become blue.

But I can't say for sure this is the situation. If you can upload your images to mediafire.com we can examine them for you.

microUgly wrote:The problem could be that both files are naming the properties the same. For example, a gradient is given a name and that name can be supplied to different object so they get that gradient. Two different file can use the same name even though they look different. When you combine the two files you can't have two gradients with the same name, so one is overwritten--so whilst one file might have had a red gradient and the other a blue gradient, when you put them together they both become blue.

But I can't say for sure this is the situation. If you can upload your images to mediafire.com we can examine them for you.

Thanks for your feedback, I really appreciate it and at least it calms down my nerves

Just as you asked, I have uploaded the two files : http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=ae7a ... b9a8902bda

I hope you can help but if that really is the problem, that's gonna be quite a pain to edit each and every single file I generate with my software... damned

coyotte26 wrote:some colours are distorted

This is because 2nd object is adopting the colours defined in the first object as I suspected.

and worse, as soon as I degroup the image from file 1, image from file 2 disappears

I can confirm this. I'm not a developer and not really familiar with XML, but I think the problem is that the some sections of the drawing use clip-paths. I didn't realise that in SVG "clips" are defined much the same way as gradients. They are identified by a unique name and when you combine two object that have clip paths with the same name, one is overwritten. The result is that some objects are adopting an already existing shape with the same name but it's a different shape in a different part of the drawing so the objects being clipped completely disappear.

Now, what the work around? I have no idea. It would be far too much trouble to manually change all the clip names, I know that.

If you don't get a suitable answer here you might like to try the developers mailing list. They'll have a good understanding of what is happening and they may know a trick to get around it. I would expect that this is an issue that needs addressing in Inkscape, but I can appreciate how difficult it might be.

OK, thanks a lot anyway. At least I know I am not completely dumb

I just tried it in an SVN build and both importing one into the other or opening both and copying/pasting one to the other seem to work fine, so there may have been a fix implemented for this issue. Try using a SVN nightly build if you can and see if it works ok for you then.

Simarilius wrote:I just tried it in an SVN build and both importing one into the other or opening both and copying/pasting one to the other seem to work fine, so there may have been a fix implemented for this issue.

Yes, this is fixed (bugs 168626 and 165936).