somnophobe

Yeah, +1 on this. I do a lot of work with a Japanese cultural organization, and when working with Japanese texts (especially in katakana) I've found it's just easier to edit it in inkscape, convert it to curves, and then import it. This, of course, makes the text no longer editable, so I've got a bunch of workaround techniques that I'd rather avoid. For example, I do all the business cards for the organization, and the Japanese face has vertically oriented names and titles. 「ディレクター」is fine horizontally, but manually editing all of the ー characters to be vertical for vertical text is generally more of a hassle than it's worth. This and the (super quick and dirty) trace tool are the only reasons I still open inkscape at all anymore.