I have some paths (they had been text - greek letters that were not quite the right height/width proportions so I converted them to path and stretched them). I want to wrap these letters around a circle (it would be nice to have them fit exactly).
I can get text to wrap nicely but the proportions of the font are wrong. How do I place a collection of paths on another path?

Welcome GregorS

Here the section on putting text on a path, in the Inkscape manual: http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL ... -Path.html
Also I think there's a tutorial in the Guide....ok, here it is: http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL ... ample.html

But I'm not sure those will answer all your questions.

I can get text to wrap nicely but the proportions of the font are wrong. How do I place a collection of paths on another path?

What do you mean about the proportions being wrong? Can you show us what you have, and either describe or show us what you want?

Also, I'm not sure what you mean about placing a collection of paths on another path. It sounds like you might be looking for Pattern Along Path, and there are a couple of ways to achieve it. One is the Pattern Along Path extension, and the other goes by the same name in the Live Path Effects Editor. Since I don't know what you have or what you want to do, I can't say which one would be best. But if you have any trouble figuring it out, just let us know more about what you're doing (or show a screenshot). We'll be glad to help

If Pattern Along Path isn't your solution, and if you could give us more info about what you're doing, we could better identify what tool or process you need. Please be sure to check out the info in my signature, for more instructional material. And certainly please feel free to ask for help here on the forum, if you need it.

All best

Place the text on the path before converting the text to a path. After it's in place then convert to path if you need to modify the letter shapes.

Here the section on putting text on a path, in the Inkscape manual:...

I read he manual and was not helped much. I was confused in the Generate from Path section (link at the bottom of your linked page) by the reference to Single and Stretched options

I had read a tutorial or two but my question was not obviously answered there.

What do you mean about the proportions being wrong? Can you show us what you have, and either describe or show us what you want?

If we say that a letter straight from the Text tool in a given font (I was using Free serif- Greek subset) has a height to width ratio of 1 : 1,the letters that I want to put on the circle have a height/width ratio of about 1.3 : 1 (they are taller than standard).
Sort of like a comparison between the "Arial" and "Arial Narrow" fonts
In order to do that I had to convert the Text to Paths. Just stretching the height of the Text looked good until I placed it on the circle whereupon it reverted to the original height
Now I have painstakenly adjusted my stretched letter paths manually rotating and positioning each of the twenty characaters so it looks OK but it took an hour and i suspect it should be possible to do with a click or two of the mouse in the right places

GregorS wrote:Just stretching the height of the Text looked good :) until I placed it on the circle whereupon it reverted to the original height

Yes, this cannot be done with the SVG feature 'Text put on path'.

See Bug #168463 “text resizing lost after "Put on Path" (SVG limitation)”:

Quoting the answer of the developer:

Strictly speaking, stretch or squeeze is not formatting, it's
transformation. What you ask would require providing a separate
transformation matrix for each glyph, because when on path each glyph will
need to be squeezed at a different angle. Unfortunately SVG cannot do that,
it can only shift and rotate individual glyphs in a text but not
squeeze/stretch/skew. So this is a WONTFIX. You can achieve what you want,
however, by converting text to path and using Pattern along Path extension,
see example in inkscape-0.45-patternalongpath.png.