David Christian Berg wrote:

We'd best ask Michal himself on this question but still I'm deserately hoping for a intersect, unite and substract tool, where you end up with one object at the end. Union become a problem when you would want to move the (with grouping or combining non existing) nodes at the intersection of the object outlines. Actually that was something that quite annoyed me when I started out with sodipodi. One learns to work around that kinda problem with the time, though.

If you are desperate, inkscape has boolean operations available in CVS.

njh