I've been experimenting with using XeLaTeX to produce nicely formatted text for importing into Inkscape and I thought I'd report on progress so far (I hope this is the right place). Inkscape has problems with fully-justified text especially in relatively narrow columns, it pads the words with spaces which can make the text look uneven.

What I've been trying to do is to set blocks of text in XeLaTeX, which uses system fonts. XeLaTeX outputs to PDF and I've been converting these to PS (using pdf2ps) for importing into Inkscape. Here's a quick and dirty example, set using a free open-type font called 'Libertine' and imported into Inkscape. There is, or course, a certain amount of fiddling to be done in XeLaTeX to avoid under-full and over-full boxes, but to my eyes at least the results look promising.

http://confound.me.uk/maps/xelatex_test.pdf

If anyone is interested I can provide step-by-step details. It might be handy for the mathematicians too. I ought to mention that I'm an absolute beginner with Inkscape, so if this ground has been covered before I apologise.

Regards, N.