The available tool options for the Texttool can be accessed by double clicking the texttool icon:

There are two ways of selecting fonts in the GIMP. The first is from the image Dialogs/Fonts menu. The second is with the Font selector in this tool. Both methods select from the installed X fonts. When you select a font it is interactively applied to your text.

This control sets the size of the font in any of several selectable units.

Uses the indices of adjustment to modify the characters in order to produce clear letters in small font sizes.

Auto Hinter tries to automatically compute information for better representation of the character font.

Antialiasing will render the text with much smoother edges and curves. This is achieved by slight blurring and merging of the edges. This option can radically improve the visual appearance of the rendered typeface. Caution should be exercised when using antialiasing on images that are not in RGB color space.

Color of the text that will be drawn next. Defaults to black. Selectable from the color picker dialog box that opens when the current color sample is clickes.

Causes the text to be justified according to any of four rules selectable from the associated icons.

Controls the indent spacing from the left margin.

Controls the spacing between successive lines of text. This setting is interactive: it appears at the same time in image text. The number is not the space between lines itself, but how many pixels must be added to or substracted from this space (the value can be negative).

This tool creates a selection path from the selected text. You can retrieve it later in Path Dialog to modify it.

This dialog window is opened when you click on the image with the Text Tool. It's a still basic text editor that nevertheless allows you to write on several lines. Word wrap is not possible - the text layer lengthens gradually - and you have to press the Enter key to move to the next line.

The text you type appears interactively in the image, in a rectangular selection that has its left upper corner on the pixel you have clicked with the tool.

You can correct the text you are writing and you can change the text font with the Font Editor.

You can move the text by using the Move Tool, but you loose the Editor then. You can re-edit this text as you will see now.

As soon as you start writing, a Text layer is created in the Layer Dialog. On an image with such a layer (the image you are working on, or a .xcf image), you can resume text editing by activating this text layer then clicking on it (double click).

To add another text to your image click on a non-text layer: a new Text Editor will appear and a new text layer will be created. To pass from a text to another one activate the corresponding text layer and click on it to activate the editor.

Text can be loaded from a text file by clicking the folder icon in the text editor.

Clicking this icon clears the editor and the associated text on the image.

This option causes text to be entered from left to right, as is the case with most Western languages and may Eastern languages.

This option allows text to be entered from right to left, as is the case with some Eastern languages, such as Arabic (illustrated in the icon).