I've just committed the first part of my text layout rewrite. The patch got a little excessively large so there's bound to be breakage somewhere (probably a lot of places). If you assign any bug that looks to be my fault to me (cyreve) that would be helpful.
It's a little sparse at the moment, but I'm hoping to ramp up the features fairly quickly now I've got a decent base to work on.
Known regressions:
1) Things go wrong if you delete a line break and then add one in the same place. I know exactly what I need to fix.
2) Linespacing was implemented as a custom attribute on the <tspan> fields. I want to move this into the css before I enable it (it's neater if everything is in SPStyle) but will, of course, retain backward compatibility with old files.
3) Likewise justification on <flowtext> (although I don't imagine anybody's seriously using this currently).
4) flowtext editing on the canvas didn't work very well before, and it still doesn't work very well.
5) I think vertical text is probably broken. It's been a while since I tried it. The old implementation was actually wrong according to the css spec, because the latin glyphs should have been rotated 90 degrees by default.
New stuff that works now:
1) share/examples/flowsample.svg renders the rtl portions correctly
2) Up/down movement in text goes straight up and down, rather than going to the same character index in the line above. Also, it doesn't jump from one side of the gap in flowsample.svg to the other. It still drifts a bit over repeated up/down because I've left some compatibility layers in.
3) Insertion and deletion of text with styles should keep the XML tree a bit cleaner than before.
4) Um...I made the cursor go italic when you're over italic text (well I thought it was cool). This doesn't work for Bitstream Vera because oddly enough they didn't specify the angle of the italic text in the font file.
New stuff that will work in the short to medium term:
1) Editing <flowtext>
2) Line spacing, full justification and whatever other 'easy' css properties I can find
3) Text selection, maybe a text toolbar too if I can persuade Bulia to write it for me :-)
New stuff that will work eventually:
1) Moderately complete css3 Text functionality
2) Anything else that I dream up along the way
That's it I think. Now I just wait for the bug reports to fly in.
Richard.