To kern in Inkscape, double-click your text, put the cursor between two letters and press Alt+Right arrow to push them apart or Alt+Left arrow to pull them together. On a Mac, use Option in place of Alt. If nothing moves, your text is flowed text, and the fix is below.
New to the term itself? Start with what kerning is and why it matters.
Three kinds of spacing, and which one you're changing
Inkscape spaces letters in three separate ways, and they stack on top of each other.
- Font kerning comes from the font file. A well-made font carries a table of adjustments for awkward pairs like "AV", "To" and "Ty", and Inkscape applies it when it lays out your text. You never set it letter by letter. The font's other OpenType options live in Text > Text and Font.
- Manual kerns are the adjustments you make yourself between one specific pair, with Alt+arrow or the horizontal kerning field. They sit on top of the font's kerning and belong to that one text object.
- Letter spacing is tracking: one value that opens or closes every gap in the line or selection at once. Kerning fixes a pair. Letter spacing changes the texture of the whole word. The difference is covered in depth in kerning vs letter spacing.
| Font kerning | Manual kerns | Letter spacing | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it changes | The pairs the type designer adjusted | One gap at the cursor, or the selected letters | Every gap in the line or selection |
| Where you set it | In the font file, not in Inkscape | Alt+Left or Alt+Right, or the horizontal kerning field | The letter spacing field, or Alt+< and Alt+> |
| Works in flowed text | Yes | No | Yes |
| How to reset it | It's part of the font | Text > Remove Manual Kerns | Set the field back to 0 |
How to kern two letters with the keyboard
- Create regular text, not flowed text. Pick the Text tool (T), click once on the canvas and type. Don't drag a box first. A single click makes regular text, which you can kern. Dragging a frame makes flowed text, which you can't.
- Get a cursor into existing text. Double-click the text with the Selector tool. Inkscape switches to the Text tool and drops a cursor where you clicked.
- Place the cursor between the two letters. Click between them or use the arrow keys.
- Press Alt+Right to add space or Alt+Left to remove it. Each tap moves the letter after the cursor and everything to its right.
- Zoom in for fine control. The step size is tied to your zoom level, not to a fixed unit in the document. At 100% each tap is a visible jump. At 400% each tap is a quarter of that, which is where real kerning happens.
- Watch the number. The horizontal kerning field in the toolbar's Spacing pop-over shows the current value for the gap at the cursor, in pixels.
A worked example: kerning "Travel" for a headline
Set "Travel" in a geometric sans at display size. Two gaps stand out. The "T" and "r" leave a hole under the T's arm, and the "a" and "v" create a wide valley next to the flat sides around it.
Zoom to 400%. Put the cursor between "T" and "r" and tap Alt+Left until the "r" tucks under the arm without touching the stem. Then move to "a" and "v" and close that gap less, because the open counter of the "v" already carries visual space. Leave "e" and "l" alone. Their straight sides already read as even.
Now check it the way type designers do. Duplicate the text (Ctrl+D) and flip the copy with Object > Flip Vertical. Upside down, you stop reading the word and start seeing the shapes, so any gap that's still too wide jumps out.
How to kern with the toolbar instead
Since Inkscape 1.2, the spacing controls live in a pop-over on the Text tool's toolbar, behind a spacing button. It holds letter spacing, word spacing, horizontal kerning, vertical shift and character rotation.
Typing a value is better than tapping keys in one situation: when the same pair appears in several text objects. If "Ty" shows up in five headlines across a set of slides or a poster series, kern the first one by eye, read the value and type that exact value into the other four. The pairs match, and nobody has to judge each one fresh.
Two cautions:
- Vertical shift moves a letter up or down from the baseline, which is useful for a mathematical subscript and wrong for almost everything else.
- Character rotation breaks the spacing around the rotated letter, so plan to re-kern its neighbors after you rotate anything.
How to change letter spacing for a whole line
Select the text (or the part of it you want to change) and type a value in the letter spacing field. Negative values tighten, positive values loosen. While you're editing with the Text tool, Alt+> and Alt+< loosen and tighten the line from the keyboard.
Order matters. Set letter spacing first, then kern. Letter spacing changes every gap, so any pair you kerned before adjusting it now sits at a different distance from its neighbors. All-caps headings are the classic case: open the tracking to give capitals room, then fix the one or two pairs, like "AV" or "LT", that still look wrong.
Why Inkscape kerning won't work
The forum threads about Inkscape kerning come down to these six problems.
| What you see | What's causing it | The fix |
|---|---|---|
| Alt+arrow does nothing, or the kerning number changes but the letters don't move | The text is flowed text, either in a frame you dragged or flowed into a shape | Convert it with Text > Convert to Text, then kern. |
| The cursor just moves left and right, as if Alt isn't held | Your operating system or window manager has claimed Alt+arrow for itself | Remove that system shortcut, or type values into the toolbar's kerning field instead |
| Alt+< types a comma or a "<" instead of changing spacing | A non-US keyboard layout maps those keys differently | Use the letter spacing field in the toolbar |
| You can't place a cursor in the word at all | The text has been converted to paths, or it's inside a group | Check the status bar at the bottom of the window. If it says Path or Group, undo the conversion or enter the group |
| Each tap makes a huge jump | You're zoomed out | Zoom in. The step shrinks with every zoom level |
| Spacing went wrong after you rotated a letter | Character rotation shifts the gaps around it | Re-kern the neighbors after rotating |
A 2025 issue on Inkscape's own bug tracker, filed against version 1.4.2, describes the first row exactly: the kerning values change in greyed-out fields while the flowed text stays put. It's a known limitation, not a broken install, so updating Inkscape won't fix it.
How to undo manual kerning
Select the text object and choose Text > Remove Manual Kerns. It clears every manual kern in that object and leaves letter spacing untouched. On an inherited file full of old nudges, clear them, look at the font's default and decide which pairs still need help. That's faster than fixing someone else's fixes.
What happens when the file leaves Inkscape
Manual kerns are stored as positions for individual characters inside the SVG. That matters the moment the file goes somewhere else.
SVG on the web. Browsers render the positions, but only with the right font. If the viewer doesn't have your font and a fallback font loads, your kerns are still applied, now to letters with different widths. The result looks worse than no kerning at all. Either embed the font with the page or convert the text to paths.
PDF for print. When you save as PDF, Inkscape asks how to handle the text: embed the fonts or convert text to paths. Embedded fonts keep the text editable for whoever receives it. Converted text looks identical everywhere and can't be edited.
Cutting machines, laser cutters and sign shops. These need outlines, not text. Path > Object to Path freezes the letters exactly where your kerning put them. After conversion, none of the kerning tools apply, so keep an editable copy of the text on a hidden layer before you convert. On vinyl or cut acrylic, a bad gap isn't a visual detail. It's a physical one, installed on a wall.
Inkscape vs Illustrator vs Affinity Designer
| Inkscape | Illustrator | Affinity Designer | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where kerning lives | Spacing pop-over on the Text toolbar, plus Alt+arrow | Character panel and the control bar | Character panel |
| Automatic options | Applies the font's kerning. No optical option | Metrics and Optical | See the Affinity guide below |
| Unit shown | Pixels | Thousandths of an em | See the Affinity guide below |
The practical difference is the automatic option. Illustrator's Optical setting spaces letters by their shapes, which rescues fonts with weak kerning tables. In Inkscape, the font's own table is what you get, so a font with poor built-in kerning leaves every pair to you. For display work in Inkscape, choosing a well-kerned font saves more time than any shortcut.
For the step-by-step in the other tools, see kerning in Illustrator and kerning in Affinity Designer.
When kerning matters and when it doesn't
Kern logos, wordmarks, headlines, posters, signage and anything set in all caps. At those sizes a single loose pair reads as a gap in the word, and a single tight one merges letters. Set "modern" too tight and the "r" and "n" fuse into an "m", leaving "modem".
Leave body text alone. At paragraph sizes the font's own kerning does the job, and you couldn't manually kern flowed paragraphs in Inkscape anyway. If you're not sure whether a headline needs work, compare it against the examples in good kerning vs bad kerning.
AI-generated lettering skips every tool on this page
Image generators produce pictures, not text. When people bring an AI-generated logo into Inkscape and run Path > Trace Bitmap to turn it into vectors, the lettering becomes a set of paths. There's no cursor, no Alt+arrow and no Remove Manual Kerns. Whatever spacing the generator invented is now baked into shapes, and every bad gap has to be fixed by moving pieces by eye, or by retyping the word in a real font and kerning it properly.
Those gaps are easy to miss in a thumbnail and obvious on a storefront. It's why Superside's published position is that "No GenAI reaches a final deliverable without human review and your sign-off" (Superside LLM info). Kerning is one of the checks a person has to make, because a traced file can't tell you it's wrong.