Today’s post is inspired by a recent thread on the QGIS user mailing list titled “exporting text to Illustrator?”. The issue was that with the introduction of the new labeling system, all labels were exported as paths when creating an SVG. Unnoticed by almost everyone (and huge thanks to Alex Mandel for pointing out!) an option has been added to 2.4 by Larry Shaffer which allows exporting labels as texts again.
To export labels as text, open the Automatic Placement Settings (button in the upper right corner of the label dialog) and uncheck the Draw text as outlines option.
Note that we are also cautioned that
For now the developers recommend you only toggle this option right
before exporting and that you recheck it after.
Alex even recorded a video showcasing the functionality:
