How to copy a drawing from one Inkscape file into a new Layer in another, without losing co-ordinate precision ?

During my learning curve on Inkscape, initially, rather than using 'Layers' to show alternate floorplans of a building, I ended up creating different files for each floorplan, and as a result, correcting small errors in dimensions & other properties of objects in one file but not the others. Now that I am familiar with 'Layers', I would like to combine all files for 1 building into a single file, as a) it is more logical, and b) it will be easier to identify visually on an overlay, which are the most recent, corrected versions of the various objects.

What is the best way to accurately copy a separate floorplan file, into a 'new Layer' in the main file, without losing co-ordinate precision - as losing that, would defeat the object ?

Thankyou in advance

I'll have to test this out but when I have done something like this I put a box around things I want to relocate, snap corners to a common guide like at 1,1 or 0,0 and the you can cut and paste over to the new drawing. Use the snap to get the right placement. I would lock the layers in the new graphic that you don't want changed, then make a new layer and paste to that.

Like I said, I have to try it yet.

Use the command "paste in place' (edit menu). This pastes into the same x,y location as the original, which is what I think you want. The plain paste relocates the pasted object to the cursor location.

Pasting in place should work as Druban suggested, just make sure the page sizes are the same and that you're not pasting into a group with transform attribute, otherwise your newly pasted objects will be transformed too.

I found that the need for precise positioning of objects wasn't compatible 'snapping' so it is turned off. Many thanks for the input and recommendation of 'Paste in place'. All of my 'versions' of a particular building share the same global boundary coordinates, which I calculate before starting a new floorplan, to ensure that when Printed on A4 paper, the building is located in centre of the paper, with sufficient spline margin - so that outer frame is common to all versions. What I had thought of doing, and it seemed ok in one simple example of combining 2 drawings from 2 files into a 1 Layer file, was to 'Select' the whole of the objects within that outer frame, take note of the the base x,y coordinates of the collection, 'Copy', 'Paste' - but typing in the Coordinates Edit box, the same x. y coordinates I noted in the source file - that way, the drawing is correctly registered.

Presumably, I can use this technique to likewise Copy a source into a 'Newly opened Layer' of another file, and also get the imported version in the New Layer, registered in same position as the copies in other Layers of that file ?

It does not work at all on our

Linux Fedora, Release 17 (BeefyMiracle) 32-bit, Kernel Linux 3.9.10-100.fc17.i686, GNOME 3.4.2, Memory: 2.8 GiB, Intel® Core™2 Duo CPU P8700 @ 2.53GHz × 2 , Available disk space: 10.4 GiB, and

Inkscape 0.48.4 r9939.

There are following difficulties in copying from one to the same or another layer or document.

There is no copy paste function in the XML editor.
There are copy and paste functions in the edit menu of Inkscape but copy or paste does not have any effect even in same layer of same document.

Not sure how you get from Ctrl+Alt+V to the xml editor.

But once you are at, you can select the object on canvas, select an attribute,
and at the bottom line you can select all, copy/paste, and set values.

Meaning if you drew two objects, you can copy paste the exact values.



If copy pasting still not works -on strings-, you are doing something wrong/or your os is messed up.