OK. I'm back from beating my head (successfully this time 
against motor shaft encoders to beating my head against Inkscape where Inkscape is still winning. My current problem (and perhaps my entire problem) is that I don't know and can't figure out from their documentation how to group things or more correctly having created something how to move it in to the correct group. For example I took the arduino pro mini v13 part from core and swiped the pcb layout because it has text on the silkscreen. That seems to work ok, I get the text on the silkscreen by duplicating whats there and moving it around. That particular footprint however lacks the square box around pin 1. Easy enough (supposedly anyway), just use the rectangle tool to create one. Figured that out. However nothing that I have done so far will make it work correctly as I can not get it to go in to the copper0 layer. If in xml editor I select it and drag it in to the copper0 layer it appears to go and the xml looks fine. But save the file and restart Inkscape and the rectangle is back in root not in copper0 where I dragged it. Fine so supposedly selecting the element in xml editor and hitting the <, >, ^, and down arrow (which I don't have or don't recognize) will supposedly move it in some vaguely specified manner between what I think are groups (although the documentation is vague on that). However selecting the rectangle in xml editor and pressing "< " or ">" moves the highlight to the top entry (what I think is the root level) and does nothing about moving the selected item between groups. Can someone please explain how to move the rectangle in to the copper0 layer?
Trying their suggested method of cutting the rectangle to the clip board and then pasting it in place after selecting the group moves it in to copper1, but won't (at least in any way I've found so far) move it in to copper0 where it needs to be. I'll probably try manually editing the xml with a text editor next to see if that may work.
Peter Van Epp