Thanks for the well wishes. Surgery went fine, recovery was smooth, vision... well as well as to be expected (which, since I'm functionally blind in that eye anyway, isn't all that good but we were able to preserve some peripheral vision).
Yeah... I was waaaaay over thinking the Inkscape printing thing. The easiest thing so far is to group by page, cntl+c (to copy), esc (to deselect the page), center my cursor on print area, cntl+v (to paste), cntl+f (to print to file type *.pdf). Delete the copied page (preserving the original) and go on to the next. Takes about 10 seconds per page. Combining all the individual *.pdf pages into a single document in a separate program is easy. I get away from 'print layers' and maintain my view of all the pages. See attached screen shot. 'Much ado about nothing.'
I'm closing in on this project. I think I've achieved what I set out to do but using Wings3d for the UV mapping/faux unfolding is a tedious, tedious process. Rather error prone, too, and I think it will take some Wings developer involvement to make it reliable. As much as I love modeling in Wings, 'unfolding' in it is definitely the weak link in my work flow.
I'm extremely happy with my UV to SVG conversion script. I even gave it a web interface so I can extract UVs from models using my web browser. My initial thoughts were that I'd release the script for other modelers but now that I've brought myself up to speed on the current state of Ruby as programming language I'm not so sure that's a viable option. The script requires the installation of the Ruby language on the user's computer and that has evolved into a fairly complex process depending on the operating system. Probably out of the skill set of typical users.
Writing the script did lead me to reading up on WebGL, though. That's a technology that allows the use of 3d environments in web browsers. I'm pretty certain that combining my script with one of the WebGL frameworks would allow me to write an actual unfolding program. I even found a programming language, not too dissimilar to Ruby, which would alleviate many of the installation issues. (Isn't it silly how far I'll go, how much time I'll spend, just to avoid using Blender--which will do everything I want!)
And in my own style, here I go putting the cart before the horse: I've pretty much completed the instruction pages of my upcoming model.
I'd appreciate any feedback regarding the instructions.
Thanks,
--jeff
OK, maybe a link to the *.pdf hosted on my google drive:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9j...ew?usp=sharing