I would like to justify my text but as I type, the text-box expands. Does "justify" hold any meaning unless I can set the text-box size myself and force the text to wrap? How can I do this? Thanks.

Just hit enter to go to the new line and the text will be justified to the side you chose

If you want to set a specific area for the text to remain within, you can do that, too. After choosing the text tool, instead of just clicking on the canvas, click and drag to create a rectangle. The text will wrap to stay within the rectangle.

kelan wrote:If you want to set a specific area for the text to remain within, you can do that, too. After choosing the text tool, instead of just clicking on the canvas, click and drag to create a rectangle. The text will wrap to stay within the rectangle.

Mmm... What if you want InkScape to *strech* the sentence but not the characters ? Like "align & distribute" for words (NOT letters) ? Mm ? (Oh, and the text bounding box that you mentioned, sometimes refuses to appear. rince and repeat)

Hi pX,

There are several bugs with the text tools - some of them are a bit of an annoyance and others are more than that (such as font variants not appearing, fonts available on system not loading and more). These are reported and Inkscape improves with each version - till then I live with the quirks *sigh*...

I believe that what you are looking for is exactly what Kelan described tho:

• Define the width of your text area.
• Type your text(s)
• Set the justification through the text editor (T -icon in Top Menu)

This type of text is called "Flowed Text", and by justifying it, extra whitespace is added between the words, but the characters are not stretched.

You can also use character kerning and shifting. This however works only on REGULAR text (text that is directly inputted, non-flowing). Explanation can be found in the guide: http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/Text-Character.html

Of course, if all of this fails to achieve the desired effect: you can convert your text to a path, ungroup the characters and then use the allign and distribute tool.

I hope this helps,
Syllie