On Thu, 2014-11-27 at 21:40 -0700, Brynn wrote:
Hi Friends, Oh crap -- I just let that last message go without switching it to plain text. REALLY SORRY!!
This is the 2nd clarification we need for the new user FAQ. The olditem re flowed text is shown below. It's the part about the SVG specification that we think has probably changed. And we don't know exactly what should be said. I think Maren suggested Tav might be able to address this.
Thank you very much!
"When flowed text support was added to Inkscape, it was conformant to the then-current unfinished draft of SVG 1.2 specification (and was always described as an experimental feature). Unfortunately, in further SVG 1.2 drafts, the W3C decided to change the way this feature is specified. Currently SVG 1.2 is still not finished, and as a result, very few SVG renderers currently implement either the old or the new syntax of SVG 1.2 flowed text. So, technically, Inkscape SVG files that use flowed text are not valid SVG 1.1, and usually cause problems (errors or just black boxes with no text). However, due to the utility of this much-requested feature, we decided to leave it available to users. When the final SVG 1.2 specification is published, we will change our flowed text implementation to be fully conformant to it, and will provide a way to migrate the older flowed text objects to the new format. Until that is done, however, you should not use flowed text in documents that you intend to use outside of Inkscape. Flowed text is created by clicking and dragging in the Text tool, while simple click creates plain SVG 1.1 text; so, if you don't really need the flowing aspect, just use click to position text cursor instead of dragging to create a frame. If however you really need flowed text, you will have to convert it to regular (non-flowed) text by the "Convert to text" command in the Text menu. This command fully preserves the appearance and formatting of your flowed text but makes it non-flowed and SVG 1.1-compliant. "
SVG 1.2 flowed text is dead dead dead. (There is a long history behind why SVG 1.2 was not finished... think Adobe buying out Flash.) The browser vendors don't want to implement two types of flowed text, one for SVG and one for CSS/HTML. SVG 2 does have flowed text (I put it in) but nobody supports it yet. The advantages of the SVG 2 version are that it basically flows text the same way as is done in CSS and that it has a natural way to fallback to SVG 1.1 text. Implementing SVG 2 flowed text should be high on our list of things to do.
Tav