Hi all.

I'm not sure if I phrased my question correctly. What I'm trying to do is design a deck of playing cards. Now, to make this easier, faster and more regular, I'd like to save the layout of objects (such as the 11 instances of a heart on the seven of hearts (counting the corner markers)) and then simply replace the heart base object with a spade base object to obtain an identically laid out seven of spades.

I looked into patterns, but can't get them to do anything that is not a pretty regular geometric shape. I couldn't find helpful tutorials on youtube or elsewhere either, I probably just searched for the wrong keywords.

Can anyone give me a pointer as to how I can achieve this (if it's possible at all)?

Thanks all!

I experimented some more and came up with this solution:

Convert all objects (heart, spade, ... numbers, letters) to markers (one at a time), then create a path and use your custom markers on intermediate nodes. Make the path invisible, done. Changing symbols is easily accomplished by changing the node markers, arrangement and directions are conserved by the path.

Hello

Another solution is using "clones", then the aligning tools, which are better in inkscape 0.47.