With svn you can choose to check out only certain subfolders instead of the whole project, but other than that you don't have much control over selectively checking out just certain files. You're correct that setting the ignore property is intended more to avoid having local files checked in, especially things like log files, build artifacts and other 'temporary' or routinely regenerated files.
I think you might need to find a different approach to managing these files, possibly better use of your IDE or switching IDE's entirely. This isn't the class of problem that source control software is designed to solve.