Thanks for both. My head hurts from just reading the standard document but it confirms what I suspected, that the transform statements describe modifications to the coordinate system, if not why anyone would want to 
let alone do so as in this case. For my purposes I think the way to get Inkscape to do it for me is going to be the way to go. Since I'm going to be modifying xml in a script anyway perhaps I'll see if I can figure out how to transform an Inkscape trans text output in to xml that Fritzing will accept (that being why I used the mini part instead of the generic IC pcb.svg) to avoid using such svgs in future.
Peter Van Epp