Hi All,
I seemed to have fixed my issue, and wanted to pass the info along.
My original graphic was created in LucidChart (
https://www.lucidchart.com), a pretty good, free, visio-like drawing package. From this package i generated the svg file. Using asciidoctor-pdf to generate the pdf, with this graphic referenced, caused the malformed graphic output. It appears that LucidChart, for any text, draws the text as graphic objects rather than text objects. To solve the problem, i had LucidChart export the graphic as a pdf, then i imported this pdf into Inkscape. From Inkscape i generated the svg and this worked fine with asciidoctor-pdf. (Note: i don't think the issue was solely that the text was drawn as graphic objects. Inkscape did in its generated svg and that seemed to work fine.)
fwiw,
Russ