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Text on a path (circle) extremely difficult


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I've watched the tutorials and I'm trying to make a text follow the outside of a circle. I find it extremely difficult. The control handles are small and difficult to manipulate and I can't get all the text to wrap nicely on the outside of the circle. Rather one letter always seems to want to stick to the inside. I've tried to find some tutorials that better explain these controls with no luck. Maybe you guys have a few pointers on how to get a better grasp on this? I hope in future revisions of the program that the control handles gets a make over in order to make them more intuitive and easy to manipulate.

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You can make the handles bigger with Preferences > Tools > Tool Handle Size, if that helps. They set the start and end positions of the text on the curve; I'm not sure how they could be made simpler or more intuitive? You might also try using Layer > Convert to text path on a circle, which provides default handle positions.

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  • Staff

Hi Norway4T,

You have to move the end handle near to the start handle, so you can fill the whole outside of the circle with letters. Check the clip below: as you can see when you reach the end handle the letters switch to inside - because they don't fit anymore in the allocated space -. So i deleted the last letter that forced the switch to the inside in the clip and moved the end handle a little more to the right and as you can see i can fit a few more letters there. So if you move the end handle near to the start handle (to cover the outside whole circle - you can fill the whole area with letters. Let me know if you still have trouble.

 

text_on_a_path.gif

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4 hours ago, Dave Harris said:

I'm not sure how they could be made simpler or more intuitive?

At least for me, it would help a lot if the start & end handles were both considerably larger & better differentiated, like maybe with very different colors or with triangles or arrowheads rotated to 'point' to the beginning & end positions, sort of like in this crude mockup:

handles.png.15a45819d27305ec03d6dc63e15c6ec4.png

 

It is also slightly weird that the Artistic Text tool can be used to convert a shape to a text path but in the Layers panel it is assigned the Frame Text icon -- that often confuses me, but it is a minor matter.

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The intention is that the handles act as bookends. I don't feel that arrows would be clearer because it's not obvious whether they should be pointing towards their text or away from it - you can move them in either direction. I'm not keen on relying on colour to convey meaning, because some people are red-green colour-blind, but in this case it shouldn't hurt so I'll tweak that. I'll also make the default size slightly bigger and fix the icon. Thanks for the feedback.

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51 minutes ago, Dave Harris said:

The intention is that the handles act as bookends.

The problem for me is it is often hard to tell which bookend indicates the start of the text entry area & which one indicates the end. This partially because they are very small & partially because it is difficult to discern the orientation of the triangles as they are moved around the perimeter of the shape because all three sides are of too similar length. So maybe just making them slightly larger & making the side that touches the perimeter shorter relative to the other sides would be all that is needed?

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  • 7 months later...

Maybe a bit late on this one, but I wanted to respond to the original poster's query, because I think he's describing something I've also experienced. 

I've played with this a lot because it infuriates me. I was drawing ellipses and getting the text on the inside when converting them to text paths, only to find that I couldn't move all the text to the outside, no matter how I messed with the little handles. I would always be left with one letter inside, as if the text was anchored there and didn't want to move. 

Then I started looking at how other people were doing this, and realised something fundamental: all those people with the text on the outside to begin with had drawn their ellipses by dragging diagonally from a point. I was making my ellipses by dragging out from the centre (by holding cmd+shift whilst doing so; that's ctrl+shift on a PC). 

I've never seen a tutorial which explains this difference (which is probably just because I haven't found the right one yet).

To summarise:

  • If you create your base ellipse for your text path by dragging diagonally downwards, you will never get all the text on the inside.
  • If you create your ellipse by dragging out from the centre, you will never get all of your text on the outside. 
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  • 2 weeks later...

HI,

I have the same problem, only I want all the text to be inside a circle, but I always get one letter staying outside. I really don't understand how that's done. I attached the test file here, I'm trying to get the H next to the ELLO, but that seems impossible. Not sure this is not more intuitively, the whole app is so amazingly intuitively, but this section just doesn't make sense to me, and the help file didn't provide that much help in this situation.

Please help.

Thank you kindly

text-on-path-INSIDE.afdesign

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13 minutes ago, chris.bannu said:

I have the same problem, only I want all the text to be inside a circle, but I always get one letter staying outside. I really don't understand how that's done. I attached the test file here, I'm trying to get the H next to the ELLO, but that seems impossible.

Refer to this post above by @owenr to see how to do this. Or use the History panel to step backwards & forwards through the attached text-on-path-INSIDE Fixed.afdesign to see how simple it can be to fix your file.

 

(Basically, move all the text to the outside using the red & green positioning handles & then click the Reverse Text Path button to put it inside.)

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1 hour ago, chris.bannu said:

HI,

I have the same problem, only I want all the text to be inside a circle, but I always get one letter staying outside. I really don't understand how that's done. I attached the test file here, I'm trying to get the H next to the ELLO, but that seems impossible. Not sure this is not more intuitively, the whole app is so amazingly intuitively, but this section just doesn't make sense to me, and the help file didn't provide that much help in this situation.

Please help.

Thank you kindly

text-on-path-INSIDE.afdesign

 

Click on the object

Reverse the path

reverse.jpg.7705d41e958dc88c3d4d776564bb5a23.jpg

 

Drag the handles

 

drag.jpg.fc48933e8acd3585474046bf68a58a85.jpg

 

The orange one forces the new line, so move that too.

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Regarding the UX, I think it might help if the button was named "Flip Text Path" rather than "Reverse Text Path," & its icon redone to better indicate that is what it does. Personally, I would also like to see the red & green positioning handles reshaped & enlarged a bit to better indicate which text segment they were paired with when there is more than one segment, but maybe it is just me who has problems with that?

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11 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I think it might help if the button was named "Flip Text Path" rather than "Reverse Text Path,"

 

I’m not so sure about that. "Reverse Text Path" indicates that the start and end of the path will simply be swapped, but "Flip Text Path" suggests that the path will be mirrored.

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11 minutes ago, Alfred said:

 

I’m not so sure about that. "Reverse Text Path" indicates that the start and end of the path will simply be swapped, but "Flip Text Path" suggests that the path will be mirrored.

Neither, to me, obviously indicates that the text would appear on the opposite side of the path (inside vs outside, or above vs below, or whatever). But I haven't come up with a good self-explanatory label.

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26 minutes ago, Alfred said:

I’m not so sure about that.

Well, neither am I, which is why I said "might." Admittedly, there does not seem to be an obvious self-explanatory name or icon, but the current ones are not very helpful or intuitive.

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  • 5 months later...

Here's a useful tutorial that helped me to get text on a circular path. Many of the other videos I've watched are either incomplete (leaving a sloppy jumble of colliding text is not what I want to see...) or they don't address the "right side up" text in the bottom — and with good spacing. I think the trick is to make use of the baseline shift — and to copy the top curve to the bottom for consistency. This at least gets it looking a little more elegant and "professional."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zVui7H93gM

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  • 1 year later...

Hey everyone! I am very new to designer and have had a small issue with some of my fonts following the path. I am currently having an issue with an ellipsis and the font I would like to use, when placed on the path, wont follow it and just overlap onto itself. The first picture is when I type the first letter in and the 2nd is when I type the whole word. It works for some fonts and doesn't for others.

ECLMB DESIGN 1.png

ECLMB DESIGN 2.png

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Welcome to the forums.
Without being able to look at the file itself it’s a bit difficult to see what’s going on but, from your second image, it looks like you could have the Tracking set to a very high (low?) negative value which could mean that each subsequent character is getting placed over most of the previous character. See my attached images for examples.

Annotation 2020-01-23 094941.png

Annotation 2020-01-23 095005.png

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