Author: TomH
[Added to the original trac issue at 7.38am, Monday, 27th June 2011]

First of, this is a mapnik issue so would need to be raised with the mapnik project at http://trac.mapnik.org/.

Secondly, as the original author of the cairo (and hence SVG) support in mapnik, I can say that there is a very good reason why text is done the way it is, namely so that the text can be positioned on a character-by-character basis using mapnik's specialised algorithm that was explicitly designed to do high quality placement of text on maps.

Yes, that has annoying side effects, but I suspect that using SVG text-along-path for road names would give worse results that mapnik's specialised algorithm. At the very least it would likely mean that cairo output (SVG, PDF, etc) gave different results to the bitmap output.