@Gamerprinter: For most purposes, especially vexillography, I use Inkscape quite a lot. Like ArcGIS, Illustrator is strongly supported in professional cartographic practices. Like ArcGIS, Illustrator is an often an expensive PITA.

While I need to get a handle on Illustrator and how to beat it into doing what I want it to, I also need to see what I can do with Inkscape for labeling. So far I have a workflow that uses Wilbur, SagaGIS and ArcGIS on the PC and Photoshop, planetGenesis, and Illustrator on my Mac, what's one more app in the stream?

The method I blogged is weak, because a big part of the reason I'm using Illustrator is the ability to live edit font styles for an entire class of labels without a huge amount of misery.

@tilt & ravells: Yeah, the outline kind of works, but generally I like the look of a glow better .

@tilt: Blurring the text, blurs the text. Not so good for legibility . It's kind of what I was doing with the underlying glow objects, though...