Looking for help to stretch characters the right way

[LostInTranslation]

For a specific design, I need a line of text to be "flat" on top, but follow a line on the bottom.
It's a bit hard to explain for me with words, but just look at the example and you will know what I mean.

With "straight" characters like "T", "E", "I" and so on, this is not a problem. The node tool is your friend here.

But with "curved" charcters like "S", "G" or even "D", things get trickier.
It's mostly not possible to move nodes down without breaking the general shape.

Also just scaling the whole character vertically is not the right way.
I did this in my example and you see that the "S" is much heavier than the rest because of the stretching.

And all this only goes for sans-serif fonts. Serif or decorative fonts can be a challenge even with the simplest of characters.

So I was wondering, is there a tool or special way to do this the right way?
I'd like to be able to stretch characters without changing their shape or weight.

Any help is appreciated.

 

[GarryP]

Stretching characters “without changing their shape” will be difficult.
As far as I know there’s no way to do precisely what you want in any of the Affinity applications.
None of them have the kind of vector manipulation tools you need and the manipulations tool in Photo for this sort of thing will distort the text and convert it to rasters into the bargain.
I’m not aware of any other software that could do what you want with text created with an existing font, although there may be some font-wrangling software that might do the trick (none that I know of though).
The problem is that most fonts are filled outlines and, when you manipulate them, you don’t normally have control over how parts of the outlines move in relation to each other.
You could do something close to what you need by creating your own lettering using curves with thick outlines but that would probably require some good illustration skills to get a good-looking result.
However, other people might have better suggestions so don’t just take my word for it.

[walt.farrell]

This is a quick attempt in Designer. I'm not sure it's what you're looking for.

Each letter is an individual Artistic Text layer.

1. Create the shape they need to follow.
2. Create a horizontal guide.
3. With the Artistic Text Tool, drag to set the size of the first T so it spans from the guide to the shape. Type the T. You'll probably have some font size with decimals. With the letter selected, retype the font size to give an integer (or Copy the font size with decimals). Press Esc to terminate that Artistic Text object.
4. Create an E the same size, and an S the same size, and the final T. Press Esc between each so they remain separate objects.
5. Select the E with the Move Tool. Grab the bottom center node of the bounding box and drag it down until the letter touches the shape.
6. Do the same for the S and the T.

This should also work in Photo or Publisher.

 

[GarryP]

Walt: A big part of what LostInTranslation wants, if I have understood the requirements correctly, is that the ‘widths’ of the ‘strokes’ in the glyphs stay the same ‘width’ after resizing, something like in my attached image. This is the thing (as I said above) which might be difficult to do with font-based characters as they are filled outlines.

[LostInTranslation]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

This is a quick attempt in Designer. I'm not sure it's what you're looking for.

Each letter is an individual Artistic Text layer.

1. Create the shape they need to follow.
2. Create a horizontal guide.
3. With the Artistic Text Tool, drag to set the size of the first T so it spans from the guide to the shape. Type the T. You'll probably have some font size with decimals. With the letter selected, retype the font size to give an integer (or Copy the font size with decimals). Press Esc to terminate that Artistic Text object.
4. Create an E the same size, and an S the same size, and the final T. Press Esc between each so they remain separate objects.
5. Select the E with the Move Tool. Grab the bottom center node of the bounding box and drag it down until the letter touches the shape.
6. Do the same for the S and the T.

This should also work in Photo or Publisher.

 

Walt, this shows exactly my problem. Note how the top bar of the "T" wildly differs between the two. Also the "E" and the "S" is way heavier than the rest.
The answer from GarryP below yours is correct. This is what I want it to look like.

[thomaso]

Maybe you can still find a stroke-based font file which was more common in very early days of DTP. Its characters don't shape an area or 'volume' but a single line/stroke only. Then the font weight could achieved with a stroke applied in Affinity. If you stretch those their line wouldn't cause differing thickness. Compare @GarryP's example.

As a compromise you could try a very thin font where you add a stroke to achieve more 'weight' (which doesn't get stretched).