SVG 1.2 flowImage to flow images with text

[Bug Importer]

SVG 1.2 supports flowing shapes and images along with
text via flowImage. This feature would be ideal for
many applications which need to mix text and graphics
freely, but are more graphics-oriented.

[Hystrix (hystrix-)]

Thank you for taking your time to contribute to Inkscape. Could you please give a more detailed description of the feature you propose? How would it compare to the option 'Flow into frame'?

[Mark Jaroski (mark-geekhive)]

Hi all,

The idea is that you might sometimes have small glyph or icon drawings which you would like to float in the text. This is quite easy to do in HTML: for example there are small icons next to many list items on this page.

However it can't really be done in SVG 1.1. SVG 1.2 does have a specification for this as part of the flowRoot specification: a tag called flowImage. This should appear at the level of a flowPara, and would contain the small graphic which you want to place inline in the text.

[su_v (suv-lp)]

current proposal in SVG 1.2:
<http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-SVG12-20041027/flow.html#flowImage-element>

AFAIU this feature request depends on solving bug #167335 “flowed text has no SVG 1.1-compliant fallback” first. See also <https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/167335/comments/5>.

In the meantime you have to use the workaround to subtract the (maybe approximated) outline of the glyph or icon from the frame path before flowing the text into it (since bug #166843 is fixed, both fill rules are respected when flowing the text into the frame). The position of the inner frame borders can be edited using the node tool.