Many applications offer incomplete or poor handling for external SVG documents referenced using the href attribute of the <image/> element.

While linking to external documents is immensely useful while authoring images, it may generate obstacles against publishing for consumption by other applications. 

Several features in Inkscape might appear to resolve this dilemma. First, the feature Object to Path, one might imagine, would convert an image object to a group of paths, just as it does for other object types. Instead, Inkscape has no handling for this feature on embedded SVG images. Second, the extension Embed Images, one might imagine, would replace the external document with a group of objects directly within the host document. Instead, it simply inserts an encoded representation of the entire external document, the appropriate handling for bitmaps.

For documents that are changed and published frequently, or that have numerous linked images, an automated approach is badly needed for flattening the host files into a new file having all SVG objects defined directly in the file.

Such functionality would be the same as during import in the case that the user selects the choice to make the imported image contents available as regular objects, except that it would allow the document author to manipulate the host image with included linked images, then change the linked images to internal objects at a desired later stage.

What support might be available to produce such a target file, either within Inkscape or through an external tool?