The Font Family can be changed via the Tool Controls or the Font tab of the Text and Font dialog. The two methods behave slightly different.

Via Tool Controls:  The leftmost drop-down menu selects the font family. When activated, the menu shows samples of the various fonts available to Inkscape. This can be disabled in v0.48 in the Text section of the Inkscape Preferences dialog if the rendering of the samples takes too much time when starting Inkscape (which can happen if you have a large number of fonts installed on your system). The text used for the sample can be customized by editing your preferences.xml file. Use Alt+X to access the menu directly. Once accessed, Alt+Down arrow will open the drop-down list, Up arrow and Down arrow move up and down the list as does using the scroll wheel, and Enter sets the family. Typing into the font entry box will open a list of all fonts that start with the characters typed. New in v0.48: A warning icon will be displayed if the selected font is not available to Inkscape.

Text and Font dialog:  The font family can be chosen from a list of all possible font families available to Inkscape on your system. The font is previewed with the text in the bottom of the dialog. Changes are not made to the drawing until the Apply button is clicked.

The Font Size can be changed via the Tool Controls or the Text and Font dialog. In both cases, the font size (in pixels) can be selected from a drop-down menu. To select a size that is not in the menu, simply type the number in. The change takes effect upon selection or hitting Enter in the case of the Tool Controls and upon clicking Apply in the case of the Text and Font dialog.

SVG directly supports Bold and Italic/Oblique styles.^[13] You can toggle on and off these styles (if the font family supports them) by clicking the corresponding buttons in the Tool Controls or with keyboard shortcuts:

A font may have other styles available (e.g. narrow, semi-bold). All possible styles (including Bold, and Italic/Oblique) can be selected in the Style section of the Text and Font dialog.

Text can be justified (aligned) by clicking on the appropriate icons in either the Tool Controls or the Text and Font dialog. The Apply button must be clicked for the change to take place in the latter case.

Left, center, and right aligned text; left and right justified text.

	Note
	Only flowed text can be both left and right justified at the same time.

New in v0.48.

Superscripts and subscripts can be created by selecting text and clicking on the corresponding icons ( , ) in the Tool Controls. The selected text will be shifted up or down and reduced in size. Superscripts and subscripts can be removed by selecting and then clicking on the same icons. Inkscape implements superscripts and subscripts by setting the baseline-shift attribute to either “super” or “sub”, and by setting the font-size attribute to 65%. Inkscape will only recognize a superscript or subscript if the baseline-shift attribute is set in this manner. The font size can be changed after the superscript or subscript is created. The baseline-shift attribute is not supported by all browsers (e.g. Firefox 4). As a workaround, one can manually shift the text vertically.

Line spacing (the distance between text baselines) applies to an entire text object. Note that although Inkscape uses the attribute line-spacing to store the line spacing value, it is not part of the SVG standard (it is, however, part of the CSS standard). Inkscape uses the value to position lines of text. The positions are stored in the SVG file and are used by SVG renderers to place the text.

Line spacing can be changed by the Line spacing entry boxes in both the Tool Controls ( ) (new in v0.48) and in the Text and Font dialog. It can also be changed by the following keyboard shortcuts (note adjustments are specified in Screen pixels and thus depend on the zoom level):

New in v0.48.

Word spacing can be changed via an entry box in the Tool Controls ( ). Changes apply to selected text if text is selected or to the entire text block if not.

Letter spacing can be changed via an entry box in the Tool Controls ( ) (New in v0.48) or by keyboard shortcuts. Changes apply to selected text if text is selected or the entire text block if not. Note that the keyboard shortcuts are defined in terms of Screen pixels and thus depend on the zoom level. Also note that if some text already has letter spacing applied to it, the letter spacing of that text will not be changed if the text cursor is elsewhere.

Individual characters in a line of regular (but not flowed) text may be shifted left or right to change their kerning, shifted up or down, or rotated. (Both regular and flowed text do utilize the internal kerning that is included with fonts.)

Text showing individual character manipulation.

All manual kerning/shifts/rotations can be removed with the Text → Remove Manual Kerns command.

The orientation of the text can be chosen by clicking on one of the following icons:

Horizontal (left), vertical (center), and rotated (right) text.

The vertical choice is mostly applicable to languages written from top to bottom and from right to left, such as Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. See the above figure to see the difference between vertical text and text rotated by 90 degrees. A block of text can only have one orientation.