I want to be able to merge incoming text fragments from an EMF file into a <text> object which might have multiple lines. The idea is that something like "E=mc2" (formatted properly) is editable immediately on import into Inkscape even though it might have appeared in the EMF as the strings "E","=mc", and "2". (Currently EMF import leaves them like that, which is miserable to edit.) One can get the right look using vertical and horizontal kerning. (Figuring out super/subscript would be awful, since those properties are not explicitly noted in the EMF input.)
However, while the resulting text object looks normal, the editing is baroque.
For instance, for testing purposes, here an example of some text that might have been imported from an EMF (the original dx/dy was simpler and there were more tspans, but this is what inkscape simplified it down to):
<text x="300" y="312.63782" id="text666"
style="font-size:17.5px;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;font-stretch:normal;line-height:125%;letter-spacing:0px;word-spacing:0px;fill:#000000;fill-opacity:1;stroke:none;font-family:Arial;-inkscape-font-specification:Arial"> <tspan dx="0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 -60" dy="0 0 0 0 0 0 -9 0 0 9 0 0 0 0 0 6 0 0 18" id="tspan6661" style="font-size:17.5px">simpleSupsimpleSubNext long line blah blah blah</tspan> </text>
What displays is (use a fixed width font and imagine Sup and Sub are offset appropriately):
simpleSupsimpleSub Next long line blah blah blah blah
Now the bizarre part. Place the cursor before the "s" in the first "simple" (AKA, before the first letter) and move right with the arrow key. Until the last letter in the first line is hit any editing operations in the cursor take place in the first line. However, after the "b" the cursor jumps back to line up with the left edge of the "N" - but stays in the first row. (That is, it respects the dx information, but ignores the dy information.) Enter a key there and it appends after the final "b" in the first row - there does not seem to be any way to enter letters before the N on the 2nd row. Move the cursor one more position right and enter a character and then it is entered into the 2nd row. Move the cursor all the way to the right and add characters and they append to the end. Press return or shift-return and the text to the right is shifted back and over the the first character ("s" in the first "simple"). Ie, it acts like the classical CR without LF if there is only one row, much stranger in the two row case (try it right after "line").
Is all of this intentional? Naively since the dx/dy are all relative I would have thought that pressing "return" would have changed a kern at that location, (0,0) (for instance) to (-M,+LS), where M is the offset to line up at the start of the first row on X, and LS is the line spacing.
Clearly all of this is related somehow to the kerning. So text -> remove manual kerns. That reduces the two line case to a single line. However, it does not resolve the bizarre CR without LF effect - even though all of the kerning has been eliminated.
Start a new text object and it edits normally, with a "return" acting like both a CR and LF.
The difference between the two cases seems to be the presence of
sodipodi:role="line"
in the tspan of the one that works. Adding that to the de-kerned text makes it behave "normally". However, adding it to the <tspan> in the svg above still does not work quite right. Pressing a return in the top row breaks the text exactly as expected, but doing so in the second row moves the fragment to the right, not to the beginning of the first row (as before), but to the same place text moves when the first line is broken in this manner.
So a little guidance would be helpful.
Is there something that could be added to the svg above, so that it is editable like normal text? If not, are these strange editing outcomes a bug or a feature? Why is it that Inkscape cannot edit text "normally" unless the sodipodi:role="line" is present?
Thanks,
David Mathog mathog@...1176... Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech