Thanks everyone, I understand the advantages and disadvantages of using curves over text now (compatibility / file size etc.). I did not know Cairo is not capable to embed fonts, otherwise it would have mostly been a choice of preference whether to risk missing glyphs but being able to edit or to use paths and not have the comfort of text editing afterwards.
@sdanisch Its not a make or break issue for me because the text labels can be fine-tuned until its not necessary to edit the text afterwards. With Makie font options and math we are capable of doing many things as it is, Only one thing that is “difficult” to do with Makie, and which comes to my mind: math fonts. Consider this:
using CairoMakie
set_theme!(font="Arial")
begin
f = Figure()
ax = Label(f[1, 1], L"Testvariable = $\mathrm{\delta x * \sigma\gamma}$")
f
end
The math font can’t be changed to Arial but is fixed (even though no glyphs should be missing in this case). I know there is probably an issue open somewhere and someone is working on it, but in these cases I would manually edit the label font afterwards if I could edit it. Now I just manually rewrite the labels in inkscape in these cases.
Another (mildly) inconvenient thing with not being able to export as text is that sometimes you think of a better word choice for something or want to edit something quickly for whatever other reason. In these cases I rather do it in Inkscape than to start a julia session and recompile the figure.
And lastly, it is mildly inconvenient that if you want to move labels in an svg using inkscape / illustrator designer, each glyph is its own path of course. It would be convenient if the glyphs of one label would be grouped together in the svg export so that the label can be more easily selected and moved. But again, it is easy enough in Makie to correctly place the Label beforehand, so there is not often the need to move stuff around anyways and if so, you can still group the objects yourself.
So yeah, as I said, all is very minor inconvenience.