fitting shapes on to a set canvas efficiently - Beginners' Questions

#1

2021-10-11

Hello, I'm a novice Inkscape user using the platform to design SVG's.

I am wondering if there is a tool or a plugin or perhaps an existing function on Inkscape which will help me distribute shapes as efficiently a possible within a given canvas size.

To elaborate: I primarily cut out felt shapes and the SVG's I design on Inkscape are for this purpose.

So let's say for example my design is a black circle with a red heart that will be stitched on to it and I want 10 of those designs.

So I draw my heart and my circle and duplicate the design 10 times. I then separate the red hearts from the black circles and manually lay as many hearts as I can in to an A4 canvas (because the felt sheets from which they will be cut are A4). I repeat this process for the circles.

I then union the circles and the hearts respectively in order to preserve this layout when exporting it to my cutting machine's software (the cutting machines own software does a very poor job of laying out the shapes efficiently).

Now in reality I work with much more complicated shapes than hearts and circles, and a large number of colours, so the process of fitting the required shapes in to the A4 canvasses can be very fiddly and time consuming. I want to know if there is a way to automate this process, like some kind of tetrus.

So I'd select all the red hearts and it will automatically fit them in to as few A4's as possible.

Or conversely fit as many of a selected shape in to a single A4 (or any other designated canvas size) as possible.

This function would reduce my workload a heck of a lot and also aid me in the logistics of working out the most efficient number of repeats to include in a particular cut/batch.

As mentioned I am very new to this so perhaps I am missing an entirely different way that this process could be optimized, so of course any input whatsoever will be most welcome :)

#2