We have seen in the introducing example that the text element can be used to put arbitrary text in SVG documents:

<text x="10" y="10">Hello World!</text>

The x and y attributes determine where in the viewport the text will appear. The attribute text-anchor, which can have the values "start", "middle", "end" or "inherit", decides in which direction the text flows from this point. The attribute dominant-baseline decides the vertical alignment.

Like with the shape elements, text can be colorized with the fill attribute and given a stroke with the stroke attribute. Both may also refer to gradients or patterns, which makes simple coloring text in SVG very powerful compared to CSS 2.1.

An essential part of a text is the font in which it is displayed. SVG offers a set of attributes, many similar to their CSS counterparts, to enable font selection. Each of the following properties can be set as an attribute or via a CSS declaration: font-family, font-style, font-weight, font-variant, font-stretch, font-size, font-size-adjust, kerning, letter-spacing, word-spacing and text-decoration.

This element is used to mark up sub-portions of a larger text. It must be a child of a text element or another tspan element. A typical use case is to paint one word of a sentence bold red.

<svg width="350" height="60" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
  <text>
    This is
    <tspan font-weight="bold" fill="red">bold and red</tspan>
  </text>

  <style><![CDATA[
      text{
        dominant-baseline: hanging;
        font: 28px Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
      }
    ]]></style>
</svg>

The tspan element has the following custom attributes:

x

Sets a new absolute x coordinate for the containing text. This overwrites the default current text position. The attribute may also contain a list of numbers that are one by one applied to the single characters of the tspan element.

dx

Starts drawing the text with a horizontal offset dx from the default current position. Here, too, you may provide a list of values that are applied to consecutive characters, hence piling up the offset over time.

Likewise, there are y and dy for vertical displacement.

rotate

Rotates all characters by this degree. A list of numbers makes each character rotate to its respective value, with remaining characters rotating according to the last value.

textLength

Gives the calculated length of the string. This is a more obscure attribute, and it is meant to allow the rendering engine to fine-tune the positions of the glyphs when its own measured text length doesn't meet the one provided here.

This element fetches via its xlink:href attribute an arbitrary path and aligns the characters, which it encircles, along this path:

<svg width="200" height="100" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
  <path id="my_path" d="M 20,20 C 80,60 100,40 120,20" fill="transparent" />
  <text>
    <textPath xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="#my_path">
      A curve.
    </textPath>
  </text>

  <style><![CDATA[
      text{
        dominant-baseline: hanging;
        font: 28px Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
      }
    ]]></style>
</svg>