Well... I was playing with the Tango icon file that comes with Inkscape. It has some problems with the ID of certain icons so I figured out I could just put the right names on them and they would show up in Inkscape.

As any other stupid person would do, I didn't make any backup (yes, I know).

So, the thing is: I somehow managed to get an orphaned clone (no idea what it is, Inkscape keeps telling me that ) with the same ID I want to use, but I can't see the clone, I select it using the Find command, but it's not visible anywhere, and when I press Shift-D to go to the original, Inkscape says it can't find the object! (that's way, I suppose, it's called "orphaned" after all).

No big deal, of course, I'll probably end up downloading the portable version and getting the new file from there. But some questions persist and I thought it would be wise to ask them now that I don't need the knowledge, that after I got into trouble again.

The questions are:

a) Under what circumstances one can get these orphaned clones?
b) How one could solve the problem?

As always, thank you for your help and time.

Uktrunie wrote:No big deal, of course, I'll probably end up downloading the portable version and getting the new file from there.

No need to reinstall Inkscape to just restore a single file, you can download the tango icons file from the inkscape repository:

• Inkscape 0.48: share / icons / tango_icons.svg

Thanks ~suv, I had already downloaded the portable version, but thanks anyway.

Also, I figured out what was going on. When you change the ID of an object, its clones become orphaned. They still exists somewhere, but they are hidden... I guess.

And I can see the clone in the XML window, so I can delete it... Pretty weird if you ask me, because now you have a "ghost" object somewhere that doesn't seem to show up on the page.

Anyway, thanks for the help.

If you unlink the clone (Shift+Alt+D) then the orphaned clone becomes a fully independent object which you can copy and paste in the normal way.

I hope that is useful.