Hi,
depending on your font and language settings, the current status bar sometimes has a problem of not showing completely. I especially notice this when I work on the German translation since German is more verbose than English.
During the course of some discussions on Jabber/IRC, we come up with some ideas.
One thing is what I'd call a "split" status bar: the primary text is in a normal font, and the secondary text is in a smaller font and typeset in two lines, like here:
http://buug.de/~colin/inkscape_statusbar.png
This is just a proof-of-concept (a hbox with two labels in it), and I guess some GTK hackery would be needed to make sure it doesn't expand to, say, 5 lines of text. One would also need to check that R-T-L script still works correctly etc. I can imagine that one thing is distracting: the "border" between the main text and the smaller additional text will move with every new string.
cornelius[cz] made a mockup for another idea: a second status bar for the secondary text:
http://cornelius.rvge.info/my_files/inkscape_status_mockup.png
These two approaches places a rather big burden on the translators, of course, and has quite some impact on the strings in the code, so it is likely not be in 0.42. (Well, the "second status bar" approach would not necessarily need the text broken into primary and secondary text.)
A third, "orthogonal" idea was to just have a tooltip for the status bar with the complete text. This would work for the current status bar as well as for any of the ideas presented above.
Oh, and cornelius even has a fourth idea, see here: http://cornelius.rvge.info/my_files/inkscape_status_mockup2.png
Comments welcome.
Cheers, Colin