Wrong text character spacing when centered or right-aligned

[Johan Engelen]

Have a look at the attached file "alignment_test.svg" and the render result in the png file. As you can see, the character spacing is wrong for the centered and right-aligned text. I cannot reproduce this by selecting the texttool and creating a new text object.
What is so special about the "Position" text object in the SVG, and is this desired behavior?

Inkscape version 0.47+devel r9168.

[~suv (suv-lp)]

AFAIU the 'x' in

<tspan
         style="font-size:12px;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;font-stretch:normal;text-align:end;line-height:125%;writing-mode:lr-tb;text-anchor:end;fill:#000000;fill-opacity:1;fill-rule:nonzero;stroke:none;font-family:Times New Roman;-inkscape-font-specification:Times New Roman"
         x="150.48129 157.43129 163.68129 168.54379 172.01878 175.49379 178.96878 185.21878"
         y="-49.838703"
         sodipodi:role="line"
         id="tspan2957">Position</tspan>

positions each character separately (i.e. it is kerned text). You can 'undo' it with 'Text > Remove Manual Kerns'.

see also:
http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/text.html#TSpanElementXAttribute

and 'Text editing tips' in
http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Release_notes/0.46#PDF_and_AI_import

[Krzysztof Kosinski (tweenk)]

Current behavior with kerned text (e.g. imported from PDF) is rather suboptimal, for example when you delete a character with Backspace, the remaining text stays in place. I think we can be smarter than this.

[~suv (suv-lp)]

IMHO this (bug #538117) is a duplicate of bug #188794 “PDF-imported text boxes cannot be edited properly”.

[Krzysztof Kosinski (tweenk)]

That's right. However I think this is not a Won't Fix - the new characters should be inserted with default kerning, and the remaining characters appropriately shifted.