Center text the elegant way in SVG export

Question

I have rectangles with centered text in them. When I export this to SVG, it is quite verbose and does not use the proper SVG centering mechanism, see excerpt at the bottom.

When I now use some XSLT to change some of the labels and the new labels are different in length, they are not centered anymore because the position is hardcoded, thus I request to change the export to use the SVG attributes dominant-baseline="middle" and text-anchor="middle" (and the label being positioned in the center of the rectangle).

This is very well explained in this StackOverflow answer, however there may be an even better way.

      <g class="node" id="EnterpriseFunctionClassified">
         <g fill="rgb(255,204,153)" text-rendering="geometricPrecision" shape-rendering="geometricPrecision" transform="matrix(1,0,0,1,-80,-95)" stroke="rgb(255,204,153)">
            <rect x="741" y="212" width="201.25" rx="4" ry="4" height="30" stroke="none"/>
         </g>
         <g text-rendering="geometricPrecision" stroke-miterlimit="1.45" shape-rendering="geometricPrecision" transform="matrix(1,0,0,1,-80,-95)" stroke-linecap="butt">
            <rect x="741" y="212" fill="none" width="201.25" rx="4" ry="4" height="30"/>
         </g>
         <g>
            <g text-rendering="geometricPrecision" stroke-miterlimit="1.45" shape-rendering="geometricPrecision" font-family="sans-serif" transform="matrix(1,0,0,1,-80,-95)" stroke-linecap="butt">
               <text x="765.27" xml:space="preserve" y="229.75" stroke="none">terminology items</text>
          </g>
         </g>
      </g>
 

Answer 1

Unfortunately, I do not think it is possible to use SVG-specific techniques like text-anchor="middle" when exporting a diagram to SVG.

Conceptually, yEd's SVG exports works by redirecting the drawing commands that are used to display a diagram on screen to a converter that creates corresponding SVG elements. The set of drawing commands for rendering on screen does not include a center command - all it offers is a command to draw text at a specific location. As a result, the converter cannot know that the original intention was to "center text".

For completeness sake, I would like to add that the converter mentioned above is the Apache Batik SVG toolkit - i.e. this is a third-party library.