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I'm working on a map in Inkscape and I got to the point of naming landmarks. Problem is, that even after alligning the text to the line, using the function in the text menu at the top, the text is underwhelmingly static. I want the text to follow and allign itself with the path, stretching and spacing itself.

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If that won't work, I can only think of one workaround, that being manual spacing of the letters, but this is the last resort measure, as I'd prefer way more to have a streamlined, cartographic way of dealing with this.

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There's no way to insert spacing automatically if that is what you are asking. That functionality doesn't exist. There's no link between the character spacing attribute and the length of the path it has been attached to. It might be possible create an extension to do it automatically - but that would involve coding, or perhaps you could make a feature request to the Inkscape developers.

Adjusting the spacing manually is really the only option AFAIK. It's pretty easy and only takes a few seconds.

  1. With the Text tool selected, click and drag on the text to highlight it*

  2. Click on the Spacing button in the control bar along the top

  3. Change the Spacing between letters value until the text fits the line

*Note: In fact you can even skip this step. You can still do it if you just select the just the text object and then switch to the text tool.

Screen recording showing how to change spacing

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  • Pretty dissapointing that there's no automatic feature like that. Thank you for your answer
    – Yulian
    Commented Jul 15 at 12:40
  • @Yulian Well, the entire core philosophy is that Inkscape is a manual drawing program. Same applies to illustrator affinity designer etc. The end result of this is that the core of the software is not designed for automation. While this could be automated semi easily, not all of the things one would want to automate could be. The entire core idea in the application should need to be redesigned with a scene graph in mind. I am personally starting to lean on the idea that all new users expect a stronger scene graph so a new breed of vector drawing software maybe is needed.
    – joojaa
    Commented Jul 15 at 13:15
  • This is entirely normal/standard behaviour for vector image editors. You need to understand what Inkscape for: basically it's a general purpose tool for drawing graphics manually, somewhat like Adobe Illustrator/CorelDraw, etc. These all work basically the same, and are not specifically designed for things like cartography. There are specialist software tools for cartography which may be better suited, although I don't know if these would actually have this functionality either.
    – Billy Kerr
    Commented Jul 15 at 15:53

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