Free Vectors

[OpenXTalkPaul]

To be honest the free vectors (see firt message) strike me as really nothing on the sort as each one needs to be traced
to get its path in Inkscape, and I cannot work out why I cannot do that with the individual PNG images.

While one can see the data path of any of those SVG glyphs:
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Screenshot 2024-09-24 at 9.08.53.png
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It is unclear to me HOW one can export it as a path SVG rather than a plain-garden rectangular thing.

I'm not sure what you're doing here, but these files (which I've just downloaded from that link) are definitely made of vector based paths, they're provided as Adobe illustrator .ai files, and opening in AI and clicking on the art works shows their points.

Screenshot 2024-09-26 at 7.52.46 PM.png (137.85 KiB) Viewed 1428 times

They even included copies saved from different versions of AI for some strange reason (which seems pointless and redundant to me). I also think they could've used less points to create these, personally I like highly optimized paths, made with as few points as possible.

They also included a set of Adobe Illustrator vector 'Brushes' of arrows, which you can then apply as a stroke styles to arbitrary paths. Cool.

Screenshot 2024-09-26 at 7.56.09 PM.png (51.72 KiB) Viewed 1428 times

From a quick skim through of this article: https://logosbynick.com/open-save-ai-files-inkscape/ It seems that InkScape's ability to read Adobe Illustrator files is somewhat limited. If you install Ghostscript library then Inkscape can use it to open old AI v8 and bellow version of the ai file format (because it was based on Postscript back then). The article incorrectly says that newer versions of .ai are PDF based, which is only half-true. An .ai file can optionally be saved with "PDF Compatibility" checked on, which seems to create a sort of a hybrid PDF+ai format. If it was saved with this option (as many .ai files typically are) then if you add the filename extension .pdf after the .ai then you should be able to open it it in most any app that can read PDF format. I did this with this with the file "Arrows CS6.ai.pdf" and it opened up in Preview.app just fine, so it is saved in the 'PDF Compatible' format.

To get the paths to be SVG Path strings (without re-tracing them as images), you would need to export the vectors to an .SVG file, which you could then extract the d="pathdatastringhere" for each. I've scripted an automation of that extraction process for that OXT SVG Icon Loader Library, which extracts SVG paths from 'font' sets saved as 'webfonts'.svg (which BTW FontForge can export font glyphs in that format )