Hello Community,

I need to cleanly scale down all elements in my document by a factor of about 10. I would rather not use "select" and "transform" for this, as the elements have different settings for scaling line widths etc. and some elements and layers are hidden.

Therefore I'm trying to do this in the XML Editor. There, by entering a scaling factor for "transform/scale" on the topmost "svg" level, all elements are successfully scaled:

Saving the document and restarting Inkscape does not help either. When doing so, all elements are the same size as before the scaling operation, although the scaling factor is still present in XML Editor.

This seems to me to be a pretty serious bug, is this known already?

If you just want to scale down your drawing, just :

• in selector tool, control bar, right icons, enable (or not, dependings on your needs) option "When scaling objects scale the stroke width by the same proportions", and the same options for gradients or patterns
• use transform panel to scale down things unticking or not "Apply to each objects separately"

Not sure altering things directly in XML structure is easier. Quite sure it isn't safier, unless you really understand what you do.

You created a non-standard svg file by inserting a transform where it's not expected. Inkscape is confused, but it's not a bug.

There are a few different ways to scale an entire drawing, and this might be the simplest. Open the Document Properties dialog [shift+ctrl+d] and in the [Display] tab you'll find [Scale: 1.000000] or maybe some other value. Enter a smaller value to shrink your drawing or a larger value to enlarge it.

There's a complex relationship between page size, scale factor and view box. I've read several descriptions of how it all works, but I can never remember. Or maybe I never fully understood.

True, but I needed to scale the entire drawing down without changing the document scale. 

I ended up using the Transform dialog and then manually moving the objects on the page to where they belonged.