Text on a path in Designer

[Furry]

What I want to achieve is regular condensed text on a curved path, BUT, I want the vertical alignment text to remain perpendicular to the page, not swaying left or right according to the path it is following. I have attached a .jpg to show what I mean. Is this possible in Designer?

[GarryP]

Short answer: No, not easily.
Longer answer: Yes, but you will need to do lots of manual work with the Node Tool.

I would recommend using other software for this – search for “vector warp” or "text warp" (without the quotes) for various options.

[Alfred]

2 hours ago, GarryP said:

Short answer: No, not easily.
Longer answer: Yes, but you will need to do lots of manual work with the Node Tool.

Shortish answer: No, not if you want to retain the text as editable text.

[Furry]

Thank you GarryP and Alfred for your replies. I was afraid that might be the case. The sample I gave was produced with Photoshop and, of course, not only is it relativey easy to do, the text remains editable.

Oh well . . . ::heavy sigh::

[Alfred]

Take a look at Inkscape (free and open-source) or VectorStyler (six-week free trial).

[Furry]

5 minutes ago, Alfred said:

Take a look at Inkscape (free and open-source) or VectorStyler (six-week free trial).

Good suggestion, Alfred. Greetings from the other side of the planet. But I am still struggling with the three Affinity apps (it's hard to learn new things when you are in your 80s!) and I don't want to spend time learning yet another app at this stage. It is not as if I have a great call for making wavy text and the particular project that prompted my initial post was handled in another way.

[GarryP]

Since you have all three Affinity applications, and you don’t want to do this often, you can do what you want quite easily with Photo – using the Mesh Warp Tool –  but the text will not remain editable as text – it will be rasterised.
See attached image for a very crude example.

[Furry]

Thanks Garry.

Affinity Photo is the app out of the three that I am having the most trouble learning because, still having Photoshop on my Mac (I have stayed at Mojave just so I can use CS6), it is so much easier to do things as I can never work out quickly enough with Afphoto how to go about things. I have been using Photoshop for around 25 or 30 years and don't even have to think how to do things. I just do them.

[GarryP]

I don’t use Photo as much as the other two myself as I still find a lot of the terminology and processes a bit confusing.
Curves, shapes and text I’m generally fine with. Frequency separation, fast Fourier transforms and procedural textures, not so much.
I think I know what I want to do in my head but I don’t always know how to find the thing I need to use.

[Furry]

I remember back in the 1990s being utterly confused with Photoshop. It seemed to have so many tools within it that I could barely understand what they were for, leave along imagining that I would ever actually use them. There are still parts of Photoshop that I have not explored (and probably never will now that its days on my computer are inevitably numbered.)

I am hopeful that, eventually, I will be more comfortable with AfPhoto. I have "got the hang" of AfDesigner and AfPublisher fairly quickly and now rarely need to launch Illustrator or InDesign (though Illustrator is still the best tool for tracing a complex black-and-white image.)

With AfPhoto I get the impression it was designed specifically for photographers (maybe Photoshop was too?) whereas I need to use it mostly for small clipart images to use in publications and it doesn't seem to lend itself to that use as much as Photoshop does. Maybe people on this forum can give me a hint or three as to how to open my consciousness about it?

[GarryP]

I think the 90’s was the last time I used Photoshop – it came on quite a few floppy disks if I remember correctly – then a long hiatus from image processing until I picked up GIMP a while ago.
I’m sure there will be lots of people ready to give you answers to whatever questions you have.
Lots of forum members have extensive experience of Adobe and Serif (old and new) products and many will have probably gone through the same re-learning curve you are going through.