Trying to "crop" a particular pattern out of some stock filigrees I found while keeping the image in vector format. The guide here has me going to document properties with the rectangle selected and choosing to change my canvass size based on that selection. I want to keep it in vector format, not export to png, but to isolate that one pattern. Is this possible? I assume it is.

Thanks in advance.

If the stock pattern is a raster format, even if you save it in an SVG (vector) file, it will still be a raster image. Simply saving as SVG or other vector fomat won't automatically convert it to vector. It depends on what you're going to do with it in the end, whether this matters or not.

However, to answer your question more directly, the step you mentioned about resizing the canvas to selection is not the same thing as exporting to PNG. It has nothing to do with exporting to PNG. It's simply changing the page size/dimensions.

Oh I see. Now that I've looked at the tutorial, I see the next step is to export to PNG. So now I understand better.

Without knowing what you planning to do with the cropped stock image, I can't say whether you want the page size to be the same as your "cropped" image or not. If you could share a little more, we could probably give you more definite info.

Oh, there is a new extension with version 0.91 that might help here. Let me find it.... brb

Edit
Ok, it's not new with 0.91. It's just that I recently found it. Well at least for the one I was thinking about, which is: http://cellbio.emory.edu/bnanes/svg-embed-and-crop/. But there IS a new one too, for cropping raster images, which is Extensions menu > Raster > Crop. As far as I know, it's a true crop for raster images only.

As far as I understand it, you can't crop a vector object/pattern/group/... in vector format. There is clipping, but that's not the same.
So apart from delving into your objects and starting to prune away the unwanted pieces (node editing, path operations, etc), I don't think what you want can be done. You can't just put a rectangle over a vector drawing and say: just keep what's in the rectangle. (Path operations are what comes closest).

Someone correct me if I'm wrong...

Thanks!

I'm going to use one of the patterns in Blender; 3d modelling. So the next step would be to make the page the same dimensions as my "crop"?

You will need path operations.
Blender imports svg's paths as curves, in 1:1 scale -default blender unit is m, so your imported drawing might appear tiny.

Just a note that svg has a term "pattern", which stands for an object fill attribute, that is not an object blender would understand.