Thanks, Krzysztof!
On Donnerstag 07 Januar 2010, Krzysztof Kosiński wrote:
I think "Pattern along Path" is what you want. First select your pattern and press Ctrl+C. Then select the path, go to Object->Path Effects->Path Effects Editor, and apply the Pattern along Path effect. Click the paste icon near the pattern parameter. It should work now.
Right; the settings were not self-explaining to me. http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/Paths-LivePathEffects.html helped a lot (I ignored it before, since it wasn't on inkscape.org).
Now, apart from having the same problem as the extension that one may not paste/link rectangles directly, the LPE works perfectly and beautifully fast and flexible! :-)
However, for my use case, it also suffers from another problem I discussed before for the extension, namely that it produces a single path. I need separate objects, to be able to set different fill styles.
Obviously, producing a series of objects does not fit into the beautiful LPE framework, so I was thinking about other possibilities. What about a means (extension?) to separate an objects' path components into single path objects? My feeling is that that could be useful for others, too, and I did not find it too unlikely to be already possible, but I could not find it. (I hope I do not overlook again something already available.)