Aligning text in SVG
It turns out that you don't need explicit text paths. Firefox 3 has only partial support of the vertical alignment tags (see this thread). It also seems that dominant-baseline only works when applied as a style whereas text-anchor can be part of the style or a tag attribute.
<path d="M10, 20 L17, 20" style="fill:none; color:black; stroke:black; stroke-width:1.00"/><text fill="black" font-family="sans-serif" font-size="16" x="27" y="20" style="dominant-baseline: central;"> Vertical</text><path d="M60, 40 L60, 47" style="fill:none; color:red; stroke:red; stroke-width:1.00"/><text fill="red" font-family="sans-serif" font-size="16" x="60" y="70" style="text-anchor: middle;"> Horizontal</text><path d="M60, 90 L60, 97" style="fill:none; color:blue; stroke:blue; stroke-width:1.00"/><text fill="blue" font-family="sans-serif" font-size="16" x="60" y="97" style="text-anchor: middle; dominant-baseline: hanging;"> Bit of Both</text>This works in Firefox. Unfortunately Inkscape doesn't seem to handle dominant-baseline (or at least not in the same way).