I've started using Inkscape for simple heraldry and have come up against a problem with patterns. I have managed to create a pattern for ermine that does a fill as I wish (instead of the installed one which is both too crowded for me and non-staggered), and that works well. But I can't seem to get the setting right to do something similar for vair. The attached file shews the result I've got by tiled cloning of a single vair to give the layout I want, but I can't find any way of turning this into a pattern fill (that will not overlap the borders of my shield). If I try to do what I did with ermine and create the pattern with just two objects at the correct spacing, I get the wrong vertical spacing when I use it as a fill. Can anyone help, please?

Hi.

Attached is an example where the repeating part was converted to a pattern.

A different solution would be using clipping.
Each has its own pros and cons.

Thanks, Lazur. That's exactly what I wanted. I did look at the idea of clipping, but saw that it doesn't actually remove what is outside the frame but just covers it up, so I thought a pattern would be better (and I could also put it into my patterns file for the future).

But if I can trouble you further, how did you the pattern that worked? I spent a couple of hours trying and failing before giving up and coming to the forum.

In your file, I see that each shape is a path, not a clone. So you must have somehow broken the clone, one way or another. Also, each shape is nested inside 3 groups of 1. So that situation alone, might be preventing it from being converted to a pattern.

Although I'm not clear if you ever found Object menu > Patterns > Object to Pattern?

What I would do, is select all the shapes, and click Ungroup until the status bar says "No groups to ungroup". Next.... Well, I'm not familiar with heraldry (although it seems interesting, and I might get involved some day). When you finish with this pattern, will each shape have the same color? Or will they be different colors, or maybe even gradients?

If they will be all the same color, I would select all the shapes, and do Path menu > Combine. It's not absolutely necessary, but I just like to keep a file a simple as possible. And having all the shapes combined into one, seems simpler for me. Then do Object to Pattern, as explained above.

Just for your own info, it's possible to adjust any pattern, whether you've made it custom, or whether it's installed in the program. Here's how:
-- Select the object which has the pattern, with the Selection tool.
-- Switch to the Node tool.
-- Look around on the canvas for 3 tiny handles - one is a tiny X, another is a tiny circle, and the other is a tiny square. They can be very hard to find sometimes. Often they might (fortunately) be right on top of the object where you applied the pattern, if you have never moved it, since you applied the pattern. If you have moved the object, look around in the place where the object was, when you first converted to a pattern. Other times, the X handle will be precisely on the top-left corner of the page border. But they really can be anywhere on the canvas (partly because of a bug) so scroll around patiently. If you just can't find the handles, ask for help, and we can give you some more tips.

The X handle can be used to drag the whole pattern around. Just grab it with the mouse. I often find it easier to bring the handles over close to the object, so I can adjust it, and still see what it looks like, at the same time. (Because the handles can often be far away from the object, not even on the same screen area as the object.) The square handle can adjust the size of the pattern. Hold Ctrl key, to keep the pattern in the correct proportions. And the circle handle can be used to rotate the pattern.

However, even with these controls, the installed pattern still might not work for you, because the controls can't address the spacing of the units. But it's good to understand how to adjust them, because they can save a lot of work sometimes.

And I also agree with Lazur, that you could simply use the outer shield shape (well, a duplicate of it) as a clipping path. Make sure the clipping path is on top (in z-order), select all the shapes and the clipping path, and do Object menu > Clip > Set. But there are situations where clipping can cause a problem (with other parts of the drawing). In this case, I would probably stick with patterns.

Edit
rinbad, you posted while I was typing. Maybe my comments can answer your questions.

Patterns don't remove the unnecessary parts either -they remove all except one tile of the pattern.
Like, a cnc machine would hardly understand it as it is now.

The pattern had black strokes around which are exceeding the tile area as you cannot set a stroke on only half side of the path.
And as the pattern uses a visual bounding box, had to use clipping for the base tile.

It is on the bottom left -two paths grouped together, clipped.
Next to it, there is a clone of that object.
Right to it was a duplicant of the clone converted to a pattern and then the object converted to a path.

This let's you modify the base tile on screen, in a live way. My guess is if you copy/paste this pattern fill to another document, the clone link will break.
Even if the parent is pasted -objects may get re-labeled. Even if it could work, transformations may mess up the appearance -pages resized to different sizes may add unwanted transformations. It was an issue before, not sure if it's present in 0.92.

So the left object converted to a pattern can also work but without live responsiveness.
-Either you need to convert the pattern to object back and forth or use the xml editor for the base's adjustment. -


On a side note clipped groups as a pattern may not work so well with other renderers. In 0.48 they looked awful.
Pattern could be drawn with no strokes then, but that would be more fixed. I guess 0,053 mm wide strokes may not be the best for the final output.
(Coming from a bit of technical field, there are standardised line widths and that value doesn't mach with them and also too thin. Pdf-s also have issues with very thin strokes. Not sure about how it would look, needs testing.)

Thanks to both of you for really full and helpful replies -- I'm very grateful indeed.