Joshua, I'm working on the calligraphy one and I noticed that you did the bold key names as separate text oobjects. This is a really bad way to do it, please revert this change if you can. Sorry I did not discuss this before, I just did not expect that you will do this. The correct way to do this is of course by creating child <tspan>s in the main text object and assigning style to them. That's what I meant when I told you we don't yet have UI for this. In a future version it will be as easy as selecting a fragment with mouse drag or shift+arrows and pressing a button for bold or italic. The entire text will be editable as a whole. This is possible to do now via XML editor or by manual editing of SVG, and when you mentioned you're still doing it I assumed this was what you were doing. The way you did it (in Calligraphy tutorial at least) is bad because the text is not editable and the alignment is easy to break. Please change that. Here's how you do it properly:
<text><tspan sodipodi:role="line">This is some text with <tspan style="font-weight:bold">bold</tspan> fragment in it.</tspan></text>