When text is added to a circle, star or spiral, it goes on the outside. When you add it to a rectangle or a square it goes on the inside. This looks like a bug? Should I file it or is there something subtle going on that I am not aware of?
Whoa. In fact this reveals a bigger problem which I'm not immediately sure how to fix.
In SVG, you can attach text ONLY to a path - that is, <path> element. Nothing else. This works for Inkscape ellipses, stars, and spirals, because they are implemented as <path> with some extension attributes. But rectangle is not - it's the <rect> element of SVG. So, while Inkscape allows you to put text on rect, this won't render in other SVG software (Adobe drops the text, Batik gives an error message).
The best solution is to switch Inkscape rectangles to using <path> as well, as we switched ellipses some time ago. But this is a relatively big change which I don't want to do before the release. So, for now, should I put in a quick and dirty check forbidding the user from putting a text to a rectangle?
Testing also revealed a bug in ellipse: Inkscape has its path direction opposite to that of other renderers. But this is simpler to fix - it's just a direction mismatch between the d= attribute and the SPCurve generated for the ellipse. I'll fix that now.