Hello all,

(this got kinda long... you can skip to the bottom for the actual question)

A Perpetual N00b
I've crawled through Inkscape and the tuts off and on for probably years now (since I switched to ubuntu anyway, I think it was .43 back then) but never got a handle on how vectors work, though I kinda got a few concepts down when crawling through Flash. Mostly I could get away with making rasters in GIMP, which are just easier for the way I think (in pixels).

But suddenly I've got to make a vectorised version of logos I've made in GIMP for magazine printers (though I'm pretty sure they're not going to even know what an svg is : (. These logos are a mixture of Text and images (not text on images, but images integrated in the text).

What The Logos Entail
My logos are text with two colours (took a while but I finally figured out how to have two colours in one piece of text, but I still have mental trouble with the idea of not being able to "select" with selection tool an individual letter like in Flash), and the letter "o" is replaced by a car wheel. BlackBlue.c(image)m basically.
(note, most of the time my alt key works, but sometimes my windowing system steals it)

How Far I Got
Inkscape .46 on Ubuntu Linux with Gnome
I got my necessary font, Impact (had to make it my default font, but I hear this is "fixed" in .47?). I got my two colours after figuring out how to do partial selection (but I think I'm doing it the hard way). I was able to import the png of the wheel that I have, and I think I vectorised it... Here's one place I get stuck. Ideally I'd like the XML to have text of the entire word (so, including the "o") in text versions, while when viewed graphically, the wheel replaces the "o". While I figured out the Trace to Bitmap, I keep thinking I didn't really get a real vector... that or Flash just looks worse when you do the same thing in Flash? The image didn't change much. (I'm going to check out another tutorial I have open that says something about deleting the bitmap, so that may clear things up).
The wheel is perfectly round, but the O in Impact font is not round; it's taller than it is wide. I could sit the wheel directly over the O in Inkscape and use kerning to push the letters on each side away from the wheel, making some room, and this looked great while in Inkscape, but looking at the final product in browsers (Firefox and Opera) showed the text and the wheel not integrated at all (I tried to group them all as one object before saving but I did get a warning, No Object To Group or something similar), so the wheel was just sitting over the text awkwardly. Apparently while it looked spaced out properly in Inkscape, I didn't really do it right. Seemed my kerning didn't stay, but I'm also pretty sure I tackled the problem the wrong way.

What I'm Looking For
I'm hoping someone knows of a tutorial or two already out there that can get me through a (re) introduction to dealing specifically with text AND images. The tuts that come with Inkscape only touch on text and not text mixed with images. I pretty much learn how to use tools from going through a tutorial.

I've seen the Stylize Some Text tutorial (where I had trouble selecting individual letters... the up-and-down baseline I could do but rotation etc I kept hitting a wall, similar to comments in the tutorial), and the Inkscape Text Tricks (which has lots of good stuff in it for me and helped me get stuff rotated for the other tut), and there are some with vectorising imported bitmaps etc...

but I'm looking hopefully for one where text and an image are integrated, where an image is taking the place of a letter, and the other letters "make room" for it... and hopefully also somehow keeping the replaced letter in the XML (even if it means making it invisible, no stroke/transparent fill?). Ideally the text is also all one XML node, and not one node with most of the text and another with the letters who come after the image.
One of the things that I like about SVGs is that ultimately, it's all just text, and so can be manipulated by scripts and text editors.

Try this tutorial - http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL ... eLogo.html