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Seriously guys, the lack of typography options for "text on line" is killing me.


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It's not just rotation and presets, though individual-character-transform controls (at least scaling and rotation, preferably shear as well) in artistic text (on or off a path) would definitely be a most welcome addition.

If you pay close attention to the screenshot from the other program in the original post, the letters are actually reshaped to the path - the lines from that "E" are reshaped somewhat to follow the path while the left edge of it is very nearly vertical.  That might be more of a shearing transform but if time is going to be spent on trying to automate such things I would suggest that the ability to let the characters follow the curvature of the path be enabled across their width - consider a few options that can be set for text on a path, probably applied after any manual character transforms that might be applied (if and when implemented):

  • Should the characters be rotated to follow the path?
    • No rotation (all characters remain upright relative to the overall transform of the entire object)
    • Rotate the entire character based on the normal of the path at the left edge, center or right edge of the individual character
    • Rotate all characters to a set angle regardless of the flow of the path
    • Rotate all characters based on distance from the center point of the text, ignoring the flow of the path (if the text is essentially horizontal, this would cause the character in the middle to be upright, with increased rotation when moving away from that in either direction)
    • Apply "random" rotation to each character
  • Should the characters be reshaped to follow the path?
    • No reshaping
    • Shear the character based on the overall slope of the path (if the text is essentially horizontal, this would apply a vertical shear so that if the bottom of the character is a straight line, the slope of that line matches the slope of a line connecting the points of the path which are at the left and right edges of the character's position on the path)
    • Warp the character based on the slope of the path (if the text is essentially horizontal and the path underneath the character is curved, this would apply that curve throughout the height of the character, so that an "E" for example would have all three of its horizontal components matching the curvature of the path underneath it).

 

Presets for text-on-a-path would not be a horrible thing, but I would argue that these are best handled as assets in the Affinity world (drag out an asset which is set up the way you want it and modify the text from the asset), and that should be possible already.

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If you pay close attention to the screenshot from the other program in the original post, the letters are actually reshaped to the path - the lines from that "E" are reshaped somewhat to follow the path while the left edge of it is very nearly vertical.

No, they're merely skewed vertically. That's one of the "old standard" pathType variations. FreeHand and some other programs had it long before Illustrator, which as I recall didn't gain it until around version 8 or 10. It's one of the most useful, but just like the normal rotating of the characters' baselines along the path, the horizonal edges of the glyphs remain straight. So they work best when the type size is small relative to the tightness of the curve.

Both rotating  and skewing characters along the path are useful for things like the ubiquitous text surrounding a circular or oval emblem. Rotating is still the straightforward default for things like curve road names along the roads on a map. Skew was once more commonly used for "Superman" sweep treatments, and was once the only quick way to suggest text wrapping around a cylinder.

I agree they are still useful and should be included in Affinity Designer, as they are in most programs.

But nowadays, Skew is rather passé  since the advent of live envelope distortions, which do cause the horizontals of the glyphs to match the curve of the path, and which can also accomplish progressive lengthwise scaling. That is far more convincing when used to "map" text around a cylinder, etc. And some kind of envelope/warp feature has long been acknowledged as something that will eventually be added to Affinity.

I've often wondered, however if it would be possible to devise more "text intelligent" envelope distortions. You see bad examples of enveloped text every day when users try to emulate retro sign painting styles or treatments common in things like team sports graphics, while assuming every such thing is just a matter of figuring out which button to click. Much of the ugliness boils down to the fact that widening text by scaling widens the verticals of the glyphs, but not the horizontals. That wrecks the design of the type, turning what was designed as a "single stroke" typeface into a "thick and thin" typeface. So could text-aware enveloping improve automation of such things, at least for fairly "normal" typefaces?

JET

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On 10/22/2019 at 6:37 AM, j_random_guy said:

Illustrator does this. CorelDraw does this. 

I would pay ...well... I guess "Illustrator CS6" levels of money for this. Without this, Designer is pretty much useless for typography. 

Screen Shot 2019-10-21 at 9.30.14 PM.png

How long did it take for those companies to implement?

This is just a version 1...

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