Why Your Text to Path is Upside Down in Inkscape

• December 21, 2019
• Nick Saporito
• 6 comments

Inkscape allows you to shape, alter, and warp text in a variety of different ways. One problem you may run into though is that your text to path is upside down in Inkscape. In this post I will briefly explain why that happens and how you can easily correct it.

Inkscape Text To Path Upside Down

So here we have some upside down text in Inkscape…

We want the text to be on top of the path rather than underneath it, correct? The reason Inkscape is displaying the text upside down is based on the direction of the path that it’s placed on. Every path in Inkscape has a direction, even though it isn’t visually evident. It has a starting point and an end point. You can read more about paths here.

When placing text on a path, Inkscape references the start point of the path to determine where to place the text. So if your text on a path is upside down, the solution is to reverse the direction of the path using the Reverse function.

Select the path that the text is on and navigate to Path -> Reverse. Make sure that you have the path selected; not the text. This is a common mistake I see a lot of newbies make.

Reversing the path will flip the start and end points of your path, which should also flip your text from upside down to right side up…

The same effect can also be achieved by flipping the object itself vertically or horizontally, but this is only a viable option if the object you’re working with is symmetrical on the axis in which you’re flipping it. If you were to apply that to a path like the example depicted above, you would end up reversing the appearance of the curve, which I have to assume is an undesirable result.

Either way, that’s how you can correct your upside down text in Inkscape! If you have any questions simple leave a comment below.

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