SVG style has a font-stretch parameter, however, as near as I can tell it does not do anything. Set it to Normal or Condensed and nothing changes, for either "Arial" or "Arial Narrow". When a condensed font (Arial Narrow) is specified font-stretch says "Normal" even though the font used is actually condensed. Just to make life really miserable, FontConfig matches "Arial Narrow" on linux to "DejaSans", it only gives "DejaVuSansCondensed" if the font name used is "Arial Narrow:width=75" or "Arial:width=75". Near as I can tell Inkscape does not pick up from the font name alone that "Arial Narrow" is a condensed font. It is possible to force the issue by editing the SVG to
font-family:Arial Narrow:width=75;
in style, in which font-stretch will be set to Condensed. However on linux it is of little use because both of the Deja fonts are so much wider than "Arial Narrow" that the rendered text invariably overruns whatever text follows it. (This was with separate <text> sections, imported from an EMF file. If the pieces are put together with sequential <tspan>s then the text shifts around, but it does not overlap.)
Copying the Arial Narrow file ARIALN.TTF from a Windows system to the linux font directory let Inkscape render text in that font at the proper size, but this isn't a general solution since it isn't a "free" font.
Other SVG viewers (ie, Firefox) also seem to be mostly "miss" when it comes to rendering condensed/font-stretch SVG.
What's the consensus - is this style parameter supposed to do more, in particular, emulate somehow a narrow or wide font from the base font? Is it best to just avoid condensed fonts altogether?
Thanks,
David Mathog mathog@...1176... Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech