Each 'text' element causes a single string of text to be rendered. SVG performs no automatic line breaking or word wrapping. To achieve the effect of multiple lines of text, use one of the following methods:

- The author or authoring package needs to pre-compute the line breaks and use multiple 'text' elements (one for each line of text).

- The author or authoring package needs to pre-compute the line breaks and use a single 'text' element with one or more 'tspan' child elements with appropriate values for attributes x, y, dx and dy to set new start positions for those characters which start new lines. (This approach allows user text selection across multiple lines of text -- see Text selection and clipboard operations.)

- Express the text to be rendered in another XML namespace such as XHTML [XHTML] embedded inline within a 'foreignObject' element. (Note: the exact semantics of this approach are not completely defined at this time.)