scott_nashville Posted April 25, 2015 Posted April 25, 2015 Hi, I'm a new user who just downloaded the beta. I've searched and seen many posts in the forums from over the past year, requesting text-along-curve functionality, and then seeing posts that that it was added, and even comments about having trouble with it (e.g. https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/8070-text-on-curve-not-aligned/). I can't figure out how to do this at all -- I've tried drawing a circle, and then selecting Artistic Text Tool and putting it near the curve as I've read in various forum posts, but when I put the cursor near the circle nothing changes, and if I click and start typing text, it doesn't follow the curve of the circle, it's just regular straight text. What am I doing wrong? Thanks. I'm using Affinity Photo Beta 1.2.0.24665.
AshTeriyaki Posted April 25, 2015 Posted April 25, 2015 I'm not sure text on a path is in photo, but it is in designer. And it's really easy! Just draw a path, hover the text tool near the line until you get a little wavy bezier icon below the cursor, click and type. I've attached a video. I'm not sure if this feature will make it into photo, it seems like a bit of mission creep to me, but maybe one of the Affinity devs has an answer. text on path.mov muddypawsco 1
toyotadesigner Posted April 25, 2015 Posted April 25, 2015 This option is only available in Affinity Designer. Compared to the price tags other products carry, why don't you just purchase Affinity Designer? hobbyists discuss new camera features photographers discuss new software masters discuss light
Dave Harris Posted April 25, 2015 Posted April 25, 2015 There's also a menu option Layers > Convert to text path, along with several other Convert options. If you don't have this in your menu, you don't have the feature. As others have said, that's probably because you are using Photo, not Designer. The apps are different; each has things the other doesn't, and Path text is one of the things that distinguishes Designer. There is a free trial of Designer at https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/designer/trial/.
scott_nashville Posted April 25, 2015 Author Posted April 25, 2015 Oh, ok, I see. Please pardon my ignorance! I found Affinity Photo from a web search on "free photoshop alternative", and somehow my reading of other posts (as the one mentioned above) didn't reveal to me that Designer was a separate thing. Okay, so I got the Designer 10-day trail version, and indeed this behaves as expected. And, if I copy & paste a text-along-path from Designer into Photo, then I can still edit the text & path in Photo. As for buying Designer...it looks great and I'd like to, but I'm working on a print project and will ultimately need to output PDF/X-4 files, which it seems Designer doesn't do (yet). So for now, looks like it's not the 'Illustrator Killer' app I was hoping for...and needing :-(. I'd be happy to buy Designer instead of signing up for Adobe CC if the PDF/X-4 support will happen soon (??). Otherwise...guess I gotta buy Illustrator or impose upon friends that already have it.
Dave Harris Posted April 26, 2015 Posted April 26, 2015 No problem. We do plan to have PDF/X variants soon. It involves a rewrite of our PDF export, so we have to be careful about bugs making it worse than the existing export. When Affinity Photo comes out of beta, in a few months, and is launched on the Mac App Store as a paid-for product, we'll also update the MAS version of Designer. I hope the new PDF export will be ready to include by then, but I can't guarantee it. In any case, it should be available in our Designer Customer Beta, which is free to anyone who has paid for the MAS, somewhat earlier; hopefully within the next month.
scott_nashville Posted April 27, 2015 Author Posted April 27, 2015 Thanks Dave! One final question (and if I should post this in a seperate thread let me know): since I may need to switch to Illustrator before you guys are finished adding the PDF/X support: Is there any timetable for being able to export .AI files? I didn't notice this on the 'Plan' for future features, and while I see that Designer can import them, I don't see any option for .AI under Export. Cheers
Dave Harris Posted April 28, 2015 Posted April 28, 2015 We don't expect to be able to export AI files ever, I'm afraid. It's a proprietary format owned by Adobe. The best we can do is export in PDF. Although we can import them, that's because they include PDF stream and we actually import the PDF. aitte, muddypawsco and scott_nashville 3
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