I am trying to copy objects from one document and paste to another new document, however the paste operation is pasting a bitmap instead of a vector.

I've successfully done this in the past, but can't seem to do it now.

I am using 0.48.2 on OSX Mountain Lion

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That's because of a bug with Pasting on a Mac. If you were in the same doc, you could use Duplicate instead of Copy/Paste. But there's no easy way to work around the bug if you need to move an object from one document to another.

One way might be to use File menu > Save a Copy. This will save the entire file as it exists at that point. Then you could delete everything else that you don't need. Or maybe you could put that object in its own layer first, and that would make it easier to delete everything else. Or there probably are other approaches. Since I'm not a Mac user, I'm not familiar.

Here's info on that bug: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php ... or_objects