Quoting Keith Packard <keithp@...579...>:
I'll read through the SVG spec and see whether this is always true; it may be that SVG allows applications to request text wrapping or embed newlines.
Newlines in SVG text are just whitespace; they don't introduce a new line:
http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/text.html#WhiteSpace
However, SVG 1.2 introduces flowing text and graphics, where text flowing/wrapping is performed according to a specified greedy algorithm.
http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG12/flow.html
Speaking for Inkscape, we're currently in the progress of implementing support for this in Inkscape, and we do use pango for what we can, but I'm fairly certain we ended up having to do line breaking/wrapping ourselves as the required algorithm is very different from what Pango wants to do.
(Admittedly, I'm not very personally involved with that part of the codebase these days so I might be off on some of the details; I'll CC the list in case anyone more familiar wants to correct me...)
-mental