Inkscape

Back in November last year I asked on the Inkscape Users mailing list and at InkscapeForum.com if there was a way in Inkscape to take a random mess of drawing objects, and restack them (or in other words, change the z-order ) in a specified direction. Specifically, I wanted to do this:

How can I do this?

Well, the answer I got was that there was no way to do it...which started my quest to write an extension (plug-in) for Inkscape. If you just want to download, scroll to the bottom for the link, otherwise, read on for the whole story...

From Inkscape .46, there is an ability to have stock patterns. This means that you can create your own patterns and make them available for use in any Inkscape drawing, not just the one the pattern was created in. Unfortunately, there is no way to construct these from the user interface, but there is a manual workaround.

The basic steps will be:

1. create a new drawing
2. make the pattern desired
3. convert the drawing objects to a pattern
4. save the drawing
5. open the svg drawing in a text editor
6. modify the pattern definition XML bounding box
7. copy out the pattern definition XML paste it into the patterns.svg file.
8. modify the definition to be recognized by Inkscape.