dx/dy and letterspacing are not the way i intend to store glyph coordinates in the layout; x/y attributes are.

Why? The most likely failure scenario is that the font used originally is not found or has different metrics. In this case, using letter/word spacing will result in wrong line lengths, but the text itself will remain readable. Using x/y will _almost_ (but not quite, due to the last letter) preserve line lengths, but may render text ugly or even completely unreadable, with letters overlapping each other etc. I think the first case (wrong line lengths) is much preferable to the second. Besides, line/word spacing settings per line take much less space in the source file.

this is just a preliminary test to see if

something is badly fucked up. note that on this sample, inkscape screws up somewhere in the advance of glyphs, since it ends with a total length smaller than what pango computes, hence the letterspacing (ie. the dx attribute) doesn't compensate fully and the right of the text is not the right of the text shape

...

4 Currently your sample works in Batik, but crashes Inkscape on load :)

i'm a 'printf debugger', so this is normal output. but it works fine here. maybe some messing up with deleting the children of the group or something like that. also note that inkscape will not render the text correctly when loading, because it can't get the shape's curve (since the element it queries for the shape is initialized after it), but as soon as you change the shape, it will layout the text (in the shape before the change, so this is still fucked up, but hopefully i'll find a way around)

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