Bad SVG text quality in Opera - svg

Question

I am trying to render an SVG document containing some text. Everything is good in Chrome/FF/Safari:
But in Opera (v12.14, Mac OS X) font looks very ugly:
Is this normal or maybe I am doing something wrong? Is it possible to improve rendering quality? Here is the code:
<?xml version="1.0" standalone="no"?>
<!DOCTYPE svg PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD SVG 1.1//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/1.1/DTD/svg11.dtd">
<svg width="400" height="200" version="1.1" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
<text x="10" y="30" font-family="Arial" font-size="12" font-weight="bold">123 xyz XYZ</text>
<text x="10" y="50" font-family="Arial" font-size="12" font-weight="bold" fill="#666">123 xyz XYZ</text>
<text x="10" y="70" font-family="Arial" font-size="12" font-weight="normal" fill="#444">123 xyz XYZ</text>
<text x="10" y="88" font-family="Arial" font-size="10" font-weight="normal" fill="#444">123 xyz XYZ</text>
</svg>
I've tried:
embedding fonts using #font-face;
using fonts other than Arial;
setting text-rendering="optimizeLegibility".
None of this helps.
Edit
The solution is to use text-rendering="geometricPrecision" (see Erik Dahlström's answer):
The result is still worse than in other browsers, but it seems that for now it is the best that one can get in Opera for Mac OS.
I've also tried to translate the content by 0.5px in both directions. It slightly changes the output, but doesn't improve the quality in general.

Answer 1

Looks like subpixel text rendering is disabled for text inside SVG on Mac.
A workaround is to specify text-rendering="geometricPrecision". That makes Opera use glyph outlines for rendering instead of deferring the text rendering to the platform. However, note that this typically tends to be slightly less performant. Also note that using geometricPrecision doesn't enable subpixel text rendering in Opera, but the text will usually look a little different (usually a slight blur depending on the pixel grid alignment).