2010/3/15 Krzysztof Kosiński <tweenk.pl@...400...>:
Please don't do this... Our flowed text is not compatible with SVG 1.1. It might be compatible with SVG 1.2, but that specification is not yet finalized. Moreover the SVG version attribute on Inkscape SVGs is 1.1, which is clearly wrong. It's actually the worst SVG incompatibility in Inkscape.
That is true, but it doesn't address the original question. Whether you use flowed or regular text, the problem of finding its bbox from a script is the same.
And the solution is also the same: you should run Inkscape with --query-id or --query-all command line parameters and parse the output. In most cases this is infinitely easier than writing your own SVG processor that would correctly take into account chained transforms, font metrics, stroke and filters, etc. etc.