SVG text scale – width and height

UPDATE - for an example of this working, I used this technique in the Carota editor.

Following on from ellisbben's answer, here is an enhanced version to get the ascent and descent from the baseline, i.e. same as tmAscent and tmDescent returned by Win32's GetTextMetric API. This is needed if you want to do a word-wrapped run of text with spans in different fonts/sizes.

The above image was generated on a canvas in Safari, red being the top line where the canvas was told to draw the text, green being the baseline and blue being the bottom (so red to blue is the full height).

Using jQuery for succinctness:

var getTextHeight = function(font) {

  var text = $('<span>Hg</span>').css({ fontFamily: font });
  var block = $('<div style="display: inline-block; width: 1px; height: 0px;"></div>');

  var div = $('<div></div>');
  div.append(text, block);

  var body = $('body');
  body.append(div);

  try {

    var result = {};

    block.css({ verticalAlign: 'baseline' });
    result.ascent = block.offset().top - text.offset().top;

    block.css({ verticalAlign: 'bottom' });
    result.height = block.offset().top - text.offset().top;

    result.descent = result.height - result.ascent;

  } finally {
    div.remove();
  }

  return result;
};

In addition to a text element, I add a div with display: inline-block so I can set its vertical-align style, and then find out where the browser has put it.

So you get back an object with ascent, descent and height (which is just ascent + descent for convenience). To test it, it's worth having a function that draws a horizontal line:

var testLine = function(ctx, x, y, len, style) {
  ctx.strokeStyle = style; 
  ctx.beginPath();
  ctx.moveTo(x, y);
  ctx.lineTo(x + len, y);
  ctx.closePath();
  ctx.stroke();
};

Then you can see how the text is positioned on the canvas relative to the top, baseline and bottom:

var font = '36pt Times';
var message = 'Big Text';

ctx.fillStyle = 'black';
ctx.textAlign = 'left';
ctx.textBaseline = 'top'; // important!
ctx.font = font;
ctx.fillText(message, x, y);

// Canvas can tell us the width
var w = ctx.measureText(message).width;

// New function gets the other info we need
var h = getTextHeight(font);

testLine(ctx, x, y, w, 'red');
testLine(ctx, x, y + h.ascent, w, 'green');
testLine(ctx, x, y + h.height, w, 'blue');

Open your .svg file with a text editor (it's just XML), and look for something like this at the top:

<svg ... width="50px" height="50px"...

Erase width and height attributes; the defaults are 100%, so it should stretch to whatever the container allows it.