In Affinity Designer 2, how do I create curved text where the curve is not a circle?

[bobdobbs]

I'd like to create text that is not in a straight line, but also does not follow a circle or semi-circle.

How can I do this?

[Catshill]

Use the pen or pencil tool or one of the shapes.

[bobdobbs]

20 minutes ago, Catshill said:

Use the pen or pencil tool or one of the shapes.

I guessed that these tools would be involved, so I spent some time experimenting before posting my question.

I don't suppose you could describe a process for curving tools that uses these tools?
Or any other tools within AD2?

I'm not so fussy about the use of any particular tools for creating curved text that doesn't necessarily follow a circle or semi-circle.
I'm more interested in learning a process to create curved text that doesn't necessarily follow a circle or semi-circle.

 

[firstdefence]

Here is a short video using the pencil tool. Notice how the cursor changes as I mouse over the curve to indicate the text will be attached to the curve. You can edit tracking, kerning etc as you would with any text.

 

[Xzenor]

You literally create a curve. Take the pentool, draw the path you want your text to appear on. (don't worry about it too much, you can change it later. 

Take the Artistic Text tool and hover above your curve. The cursor should then change from the regular A to a T with a line below it to indicate that it's gonna be text on a a curve.. Click, and start typing. there are green and red arrows that you can drag to indicate where your text should start and end.

 

EDIT: ah, @firstdefencebeat me to it...

[bobdobbs]

7 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

Here is a short video using the pencil tool. Notice how the cursor changes as I mouse over the curve to indicate the text will be attached to the curve. You can edit tracking, kerning etc as you would with any text.

Thank you!
I thought it was something like that, but I wasn't able to do it until following that video closely.

However, after using this technique I've got another issue:
After manipulating the curve to get a close approximation of the shape that I want, the next thing I want to do is to manipulate the individual letter.

What I had in mind was selecting all the letter and doing the 'ungroup' operation.
But I can't do that from the menus or the layers panel.

So from here, how do I manipulate the individual letters?

[GarryP]

1 hour ago, bobdobbs said:

After manipulating the curve to get a close approximation of the shape that I want, the next thing I want to do is to manipulate the individual letter.

Once you have text on a curve you can reformat the text pretty much as you would if the text were in an Artistic Text layer, as shown in the video above – if you want to reformat a single character then just select that character before reformatting.

If you want to do something to the letter which you cannot do via the normal text formatting functionalities then you probably need to use Convert To Curves (on the Context Toolbar), and then Ungroup if necessary, to change the text to vector curves, before doing the further manipulation.

Note: By using Convert to Curves you will remove the original curve and therefore won’t be able to go back to change it.