I just committed another exciting patch from Fred: support for flowing text!
http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG12/#flow
So far it's pretty much read-only, i.e. there's no UI yet for creating flow objects. But they are rendered already, and you can partially edit the envelope shape. Load share/examples/flowtext.svg from CVS, select the object, switch to node tool. and node-edit the envelope - the text will reflow into whatever shape you give it, preserving all the paragraph divisions and applied styles. Really exciting.
There are two flow shapes in that example; when the text does not fit entirely in the first one, the rest will go to the second shape (to the right). There's also an "excluded" shape in the middle that the text flows around. You can only edit the first shape so far. You also cannot yet edit the flowed text by text tool - this is yet to be done.
Note that this is a feature from SVG 1.2, which itself is not final yet and may change. This means that Batik or Adobe can't yet render that example. And yes, I know, we don't support all of 1.1 yet :) Now with Pango and this new patch, I hope to find time for rewriting the rest of the text system for the next version, to finally make it usable.