Alright, here's what I've got for now (below is the draft of what I'd put in the wiki):

Text-UI-improvements

Text UI with space, kerning, path and flow

Summary: An improvement of the text toolbar functionalities, adding: spacing, kerning, put-on-path, flow-into-shape (with auto align and padding values) and perhaps more font styles (underline, etc.). All this is done without making the toolbar excessively long via usage of drop-downs.

http://img135.imageshack.us/img135/5168/textinterface1ix1.png

The interface: - (by the way, can the font size value drop-down be made slightly smaller?) - clicking on "Spacing" pops up a temporary drop-down, where you can set the line spacing and letter spacing values. Clicking anywhere else closes it. It is assumed that users would not need to modify these Too often. - the "horizontal layout" button is eliminated to save some space. - more font styles are accessible from the toolbar. However, this may take too much space, so see below for alternate toolbar. - Kerning is also accessed via a drop-down. There you can set values manually, but mouse-over will reveal the shortcuts, so users quickly learn how to manually do kerning instead of having to use the drop-down all the time. A button enables the user to remove all kerning. - the "put text on path" operation is included onto the text toolbar. To use it, you simple select both the text and the path, and click the button. Clicking again removes the operation. - the "flow text into shape" is very useful for charts and comics. However, the current operation is too limited because of the absence of padding and alignment options. More precisions below.

Note that I have made heavy use of down-downs. There are two major differences between such drop-downs and popping up a whole Text dialog that makes them hopefully more pleasant to use: - they're Smaller. i.e., less cumbersome. You can access exactly the operations you need without popping up something huge in the middle of the screen. - they disappear as soon as you click elsewhere, so you quickly get them out of the way. - and yet they still allow you to quickly access some operations that are hopefully not Too frequent.

Precisions on the "flow into shape" section:

- I often make charts, and it is extremely cumbersome to bring up the align dialog all the time just because I want to align a text to the center of a shape. Ideally, this should be automatic. I forgot who first came up with the align grid for Inkscape, but credits goes to him! :) The align grid is as its name implies: clicking on the center aligns the text to the middle-center of the object (as is often the case for chart items and comic bubbles), the top-left option is most use for text boxes. Right- alignment would be handy for Asian layouts. See examples:

http://img176.imageshack.us/img176/7099/alignmentbc9.png

- Also, the padding is automatic: it basically automatically creates a shape inset of that value, and flows the text into the invisible shape. This way the form can finally be used as the actual border of the frame instead of other complicated work-arounds.

- Ideally, the x and y values of padding could be set independently, but it is otherwise not really a problem because in the case of comic shapes, for example, the text would be aligned to middle-center so the top and bottom borders will rarely be reached.

Alternate interface: the following interface presents ideas to further reduce toolbar length:

http://img260.imageshack.us/img260/8550/textinterface2nb3.png

- the text align options would be reduced to a single button with a horizontal drop-down. However, users would probably like to have these options at top-level. - instead of cluttering the bar with font styles, another drop- down could be used. What goes into this drop-down depends on who plans to stuff it: it can be more buttons, check boxes, even complex drop-downs like Open Office (though hopefully not That complex and not That big). This allows users to access a wide range of rare styles as they are made available. - if the x and y padding values of "border" for text flow can be modified separately, then they get grouped into a drop-down as well.

Anyway, I know many of you are busy. I'll probably leave this proposal up for about a week, and in the meantime, I'm open to any additional suggestions, or I'll wait longer if anybody gives a more specific date on when they'll have time.

As you can see, many of the elements have several possibilities, so there could be additional refinement there as well. :)