Quoting Landon Blake <lblake@...24...>:
This is something I might be able to work on.....I've just begun = learning C and GTK GUI programming, so that I can contribute to Inkscape = development.
Any idea how I might get started?
Well... there's a few things to that.
It's one feature I've looked at a little.
Probably one of the initial things would be to define the problem.
Skimming the pertinent parts of the SVG specs might be one thing http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/fonts.html
Then getting some test cases would be good http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Test/20030813/htmlframe/full-fonts-elem-01-t.... http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Test/20030813/htmlframe/full-fonts-elem-02-t.... http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Test/20030813/htmlframe/full-fonts-elem-03-b.... http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Test/20030813/htmlframe/full-fonts-elem-04-b....
Those came from the SVG 1.1 Test Suite, which can be found at http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Test/
Though aside from those, getting a few simple test cases from what Adobe Illustrator exports could be good also. I'm not sure if it varies much from those cases.
Load up a file from one of those test cases, and look how things work. Breakpointing some of those files listed in that .tgz Bulia sent can help.