Hello,

I'm not sure what I've done but it's one of those things that I can't even come up with the correct search terms to get any meaningful hits.

I created several pieces of text work in Inkscape and saved it in the default format. Some were just trying out different looks and then I honed into what I wanted to use and really spent hours and hours manually tweaking and kearning until I had it exactly how I wanted it. I saved it and copied it into multiple other new files so I could experiment more with it without risking losing the tweaking etc.

Then, I tried some more experimenting and tried multiple tutorials for how to create curved text. For what it's worth, none of it worked. I followed along and chose the path I drew and the text I wanted to curve and chose "Text>Put On Path" but it never worked. I have no idea why. I had a terrible time trying to just get the line drawn because I couldn't seem to get the nodes to show up so I could curve it. I thought I had it (did get a curve) but never got the text working.

Now, I went back to my previous saved text creation and I cannot edit the text at all! Every time I try to select it, it automatically switches to the "Node" mode and wants me to edit the lines of the text node by node. I've chosen the text tool over and over, tried to select the text then choose the text tool and nothing works. I tried it across all of my saved files and it's the same. Some of the original text I tried out still can be edited. I finally had to recreate one part of the text again from scratch to try to tweak it some more and couldn't edit. But now just minutes later, it also can no longer be edited except via the nodes, which obviously doesn't allow me to switch font, size, spacing, etc.

I'm thinking that some setting got clicked wrong somewhere when I was trying to curve the other text and now it's always going into the node edit mode. I just can't figure out what to do to fix this but I have to be able to edit my text. I don't want to have to start all over and even if I did, the fact that the text I just recreated can no longer be edited except for via the node link says to me that even if I do recreate the entire thing, if I don't fix this issue, I still won't be able to edit the new text. I have, of course, made sure that it's not grouped or something like that.

If you could please help me with this, I would really appreciate it! Thank you so much in advance.

Please upload one of your files or a test example, so we can take a look....

Seems that at some point, you converted your text to path (Path -> Object to Path).

This will turn an object that previously had object-specific properties (like font, kerning, text contents for a text, or corner radius for a rectangle, or radius for a circle) into a plain path, only consisting of nodes and lines that connect those nodes. You cannot edit those paths as text, just like you cannot deform single letters of the text when it's still a real text object.

There is no way back from a Path object to a Text object, unless you can still hit 'Undo' (but I guess you closed Inkscape in between, and the undo history ends there).