Typography is an important part of design. A key factor in creating impressive typography is the spacing of your text. GIMP makes it easy to adjust both line spacing, or leading, and letter spacing, or kerning, to create striking effects. You don’t need special fonts or extra tools. It’s all built into GIMP’s Text tool.

GIMP is a popular free, open-source image editing application, but its Text Tool is not designed to work with text in any significant way. This should come as no surprise, since GIMP is designed to edit images. However, some users prefer to work with text in GIMP. If you are one of these users, GIMP's Text Tools offer a fair amount of control for working with text in the software.

Open GIMP and create a project to work in, if you don't already have one.

Select the text tool from your toolbox on the left side of the screen. The icon is the letter A. If you prefer a shortcut, that's the T key on your keyboard.