<p>I am trying to make SVG XML documents with a mixture of lines and brief text snippets (two or three words typically). The major problem I'm having is getting the text aligning with line segments.</p>

<p>For horizontal alignment I can use <code>text-anchor</code> with <code>left</code>, <code>middle</code> or <code>right</code>. I can't find a equivalent for vertical alignment; <code>alignment-baseline</code> doesn't seem to do it, so at present I'm using <code>dy="0.5ex"</code> as a kludge for centre alignment.</p>

<p>Is there a proper manner for aligning with the vertical centre or top of the text?</p>

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).