I'm feeling pretty stuck here.
I imported a PDF of an architectural drawing, and it looked great.

But it turns out all the text is now a single object.  With "substitute fonts" it ended up as a single "text".  With "draw fonts" it put the whole page (Arch D size!) as a single "path" object.

That's fine.  But how can I edit parts of this?  It's not "grouped",
and selecting any part of it selects the entire page worth.  How can I break this up?  Attached as a svg zip.

Windows 10 Inkscape 1.4

Inkscape's Node tool has quite powerful editing capabilities as described here. https://inkscape.org/ast/doc/keys.html#idm1970

[alt+click_drag] selects nodes inside a traced path. [click_drag] to rectangle-select nodes. [shift+click_drag] adds more nodes to the selection. Hover over a node then [mousewheel] to select/deselect adjacent nodes. [ctrl+mousewheel] to select/deselect nodes in a sub-path.

[delete] removes the selected nodes. [ctr+x] cuts the nodes. [ctrl+c] copies them. [ctrl+v] pastes nodes into the selected shape or into a new shape if nothing is selected. [ctrl+alt+v] pastes nodes to the original location.

You can try Path->Split path which will turn the whole path into single path-per-glyph. Not sure if this helps. Or run it through a OCR software to make it text again.

Ok, I got it.

click_drag,  alt+click_drag, shift+click_drag did nothing, and that's what threw me off.
clicking ANY part of the giant thing selected all the nodes.
THEN I could click_drag and delete part of it.

And path->split worked also.

Thanks!

Hmm, I'm back.
Here's the text version of this.
I've got it down to a single text object, but can't find a way to edit individual text.

Duplicating the text object gives a somewhat more editable text object, but only if the object browser is used to select an individual tspan.
On exit Inkscape crashes (Win 10).

Any tips on how to edit this text?
 

Your text structure is a mess, but common to many imported pdf files. All text has been combined in a single text object.

First some housekeeping. [File > Clean Up Document] removes unused clip paths and other detritus. Delete the duplicated text. Save.

Open the svg file in a text editor and you'll see the structure is like this:

    ....
    <text
       id="text64"
       xml:space="preserve"
       style="display:inline"
       transform="matrix(1.3333333,0,0,1.3333333,2219.0407,2481.2791)"><tspan
       ....</tspan><tspan
       ....</tspan><tspan
       ....</tspan><tspan
       ....
       ....</tspan></text>

<text starts a text object. <tspan starts a line. </tspan><tspan ends one line and starts the next. </tspan></text> ends a line and ends the text object.

To split lines of text into separate text objects, change this:

       </tspan><tspan

to this:

       </tspan></text>
       <text><tspan

Find and replace all.

Lastly, transform="matrix(... poses a problem. The original text object was stretched so this should apply to the separated texts too. But this will interfere with text placement. The solution is to move this out of the text object and into the parent group or layer.

  <g
     transform="matrix(1.3333333,0,0,1.3333333,2219.0407,2481.2791)"
     id="g1"
     inkscape:groupmode="layer"
     inkscape:label="1"
     style="display:inline">
    <text
     ....</tspan></text>
    <text><tspan
     ....</tspan></text>