Hi,
First, I'm a new and very impressed user of Inkscape. I'm no drawing application expert (far from it), but to me it seems that a lot of careful and creative thinking has gone into designing the user interface, and the result is very enabling.
An issue has arisen that I bet has been asked before; if so, my apologies (I did search for it). My daughter and I are are using Inkscape to try drawing a new set of icons for an open-source educational game (Tuxmath). These icons contain a number of distinct objects (penguins, igloos) that can be mixed-and-matched, and the individual ingredients can change (the penguin can flap its wings, part of the igloo can melt, etc.) We're now to the stage where we're trying to combine these ingredients into whole icons; however, we're noticing that as we improve as artists we'd like to, for example, go back and fix up our igloo a bit more---but then we find ourselves making the same changes (or delete, copy, paste) in all the "derived" files that use the igloo + other ingredients. I'd like to find out if there's a way that these improvements can be propagated to all of our combined icons without having to manually copy-and-paste. Basically, is there a way to embed an object as a link? And then have future edits build from there?
Thanks for taking the time to read and answer this, and, most importantly, for a terrific application!
--Tim