Despite Inkscape’s powerful text-editing capabilities, sometimes you will still want to convert text to path—for example, to edit the outlines of the letters, to clip something with your text (that requires a path), or to be able to send your SVG document to someone who may not have the font you’re using. The command Path ▸ Object to Path (
) will work on text objects just as it does on shapes (13.1.1 How Path Effects Work).
Unlike a shape, a text object becomes not a single path but a group of paths, one for each glyph (character) of the original text. This allows Inkscape to fully preserve the appearance of the text, including any styling applied to spans inside it. Now you can select any individual letter with 
-click in the Selector tool or with a simple click in the Node tool. If you prefer to have a single path corresponding to the entire text object, choose Path ▸ Object to Path as above, then use Path ▸ Combine (
) to combine all of the characters into a single path object with a uniform style.