Inkscape can copy & paste styles

2026-05-10

Freezr wished that Inkscape had more convenient ways to manipulate the styling of text objects. (quotations come from their page, licensed CC BY 4.0)

I'm here to say that one of their wishes is already true!

Pasting styles is a thing

They wanted to be able to copy a text object's styling and then paste only that onto another text object:

Inkscape lacks a method to copy text attributes and paste them onto another text. The workaround is usually to duplicate text that is already styled, then paste the new text into it. This is fine, but a copy-and-paste style function should be available as well; below is a mockup to illustrate what I mean:

[from freezr] Inkscape Copy & Paste Text Style Mock Up

This functionality already exists in Inkscape. Copy the object with the style you want to reuse, then select the target and press Ctrl + Shift + V. (That's the shortcut for the menu option Edit / Paste... / Style.)

[webm 304 kB] Video demo

This also works for any other kind of object that has styling.

Style presets are not a thing (to my knowledge)

Freezr's next wish was to be able to make a collection of premade styles, so they could be easily applied. And I assume that editing one of these styles would also update all objects that have that style. I don't think Inkscape has that feature, but that would be cool to have.

Otherwise, the crappy workaround is probably dropping down to raw XML, adding classes to some elements, then using a CSS stylesheet that styles those classes.

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