This is what I got off Inkscape's website...does this make any sense to you?
Creating text
Inkscape is capable of creating long and complex texts. However, it's also pretty convenient for creating small text objects such as heading, banners, logos, diagram labels and captions, etc. This section is a very basic introduction into Inkscape's text capabilities.
Creating a text object is as simple as switching to the Text tool (F8), clicking somewhere in the document, and typing your text. To change font family, style, size, and alignment, open the Text and Font dialog (Shift+Ctrl+T). That dialog also has a text entry tab where you can edit the selected text object - in some situations, it may be more convenient than editing it right on the canvas (in particular, that tab supports as-you-type spell checking).
Like other tools, Text tool can select objects of its own type - text objects -so you can click to select and position the cursor in any existing text object (such as this paragraph).
One of the most common operations in text design is adjusting spacing between letters and lines. As always, Inkscape provides keyboard shortcuts for this. When you are editing text, the Alt+< and Alt+> keys change the letter spacing in the current line of a text object, so that the total length of the line changes by 1 pixel at the current zoom (compare to Selector tool where the same keys do pixel-sized object scaling). As a rule, if the font size in a text object is larger than the default, it will likely benefit from squeezing letters a bit tighter than the default. Here's an example:
The tightened variant looks a bit better as a heading, but it's still not perfect: the distances between letters are not uniform, for example the “a” and “t” are too far apart while “t” and “i” are too close. The amount of such bad kerns (especially visible in large font sizes) is greater in low quality fonts than in high quality ones; however, in any text string and in any font you will probably find pairs of letters that will benefit from kerning adjustments.
Inkscape makes these adjustments really easy. Just move your text editing cursor between the offending characters and use Alt+arrows to move the letters right of the cursor. Here is the same heading again, this time with manual adjustments for visually uniform letter positioning:
In addition to shifting letters horizontally by Alt+Left or Alt+Right, you can also move them vertically by using Alt+Up or Alt+Down:
Of course you could just convert your text to path (Shift+Ctrl+C) and move the letters as regular path objects. However, it is much more convenient to keep text as text - it remains editable, you can try different fonts without removing the kerns and spacing, and it takes much less space in the saved file. The only disadvantage to the “text as text” approach is that you need to have the original font installed on any system where you want to open that SVG document.
Similar to letter spacing, you can also adjust line spacing in multi-line text objects. Try the Ctrl+Alt+< and Ctrl+Alt+> keys on any paragraph in this tutorial to space it in or out so that the overall height of the text object changes by 1 pixel at the current zoom. As in Selector, pressing Shift with any spacing or kerning shortcut produces 10 times greater effect than without Shift.