I'm a student writing a report. Having researched briefly on the Internet, it appears that most bio-scientists arrange their figures in MS PowerPoint, Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator. I imagine Illustrator is the most powerful but don't want to pay for it and PowerPoint is pretty poor (I wont list the reasons) so I'll be using Inkscape.

The problem is that when I arrange my figures (some are JPEG micrographs or screencaptures and others are schematics I've produced from scratch in Inkscape) and export them as PNGs, the text size will vary with the ultimate image size in MS Word. I could try producing only the graphical elements in Inkscape and then adding all text in text-boxes in MS Word but then I can't align them to the individual graphical elements like I can from within Inkscape. Is there anyway of important SVG images into MS Word so that I can make font-sizes consistent between figures?

I think Adobe Illustrator and Abobe InDesign would be the perfect combination but, surprisingly, I couldn't afford copies for my personal desktop, laptop and work desktop and my supervisors would be annoyed that I was messing around in software they'd never heard of. They may have never considered that font-size between their figures is inconsistent but I think it makes the finished piece look a lot more professional.

The problem is that when I arrange my figures (some are JPEG micrographs or screencaptures and others are schematics I've produced from scratch in Inkscape) and export them as PNGs, the text size will vary with the ultimate image size in MS Word.

Hhhm, are the texts of the same pt size? For example, if you used 12 pt text in all cases, they should all be the same size in Word. Unless you scale some and not others, or scale to different sizes (or export to different dpi).

I could try producing only the graphical elements in Inkscape and then adding all text in text-boxes in MS Word but then I can't align them to the individual graphical elements like I can from within Inkscape.

I'm not sure, but I think a desktop publishing program such as Scribus (free and opens source, like Inkscape ) might work better for this. (Scribus website: http://www.scribus.net/)

I've just realised that I could use neither Adobe InDesign nor Scribus, since Zotero, my reference manager, only has plug-ins for OpenOffice and MS Word...

Indeed, I've been exporting at different DPI and resizing in MS Word but DPI doesn't mean anything to me... more DPI should pack more pixels in a smaller space since by definition, it's "per inch" but I see that's not how it works. Still, until I've inserted the figure into my document, I can't tell how I want it proportioned - I'd just like the text to remain the same size. Ideally, I could put my SVG figure into my Word document, and then edit it from within there.

Aaah. Well, would you be able to go ahead and create the text in Inkscape, maybe on a separate layer, just to keep things organized. Hide the text layer to export the image at the required dpi. Then turn it back on, and hide the image layer. Then export the text at 90 dpi (then "regular" or default resolution). Maybe???

I too draw diagrams in Inkscape and then import them into word. If you know how large the figure is to be in Word, then do the scaling in inkscape first and export it at 300dpi. keeping the text on a separate layer helps, so if you do end up scaling you figure at the last minuet to fit a space (which lets face it you will, you can quickly shrink/grow image in inkscape and then reselect the text and change its font size.

Not ideal, Oh another tip, often image /figures end up about the same width when used, so make you drawings that width to start off with.