[cairo] svg surface problems

[Alex Mac]

when I use pango to render some text to an svg surface cairo generates
a path for each glyph and then references them to achieve the result.
I know this will solve problems of people not having the right fonts
installed but it makes the svg files massive and unusable if you
actually need to extract the text content, is there anyway I can tell
cairo to just generate <svg:text> elements?

Also cairo adds a rectangular clipping path to the svg file which is
pointless as the outer <svg:svg> element has an implicit clipping
path. How do I disable this?

thanks,
Alex