AF-Designer: Aligning Text on cruve

[heyix01]

Hi guys,

during my actual work with AF-Designer one small question occured looking at some detail: How can I finetune or adjust the behaviour how pathtext aligns to the path. As you can see in the attached image the letters (on the cricle) align on their right to the cruve and always the left is hovering above the line. So the whole word is looking some kind of chopped up.

How can I align the letters exactly perpendicular to the circle that their vertical centerlines all point to the center of the circle?

Thanks, Ralf

[markw]

Hello Ralf and welcome to the Affinity forums
If you open the Character panel, have you any adjustment applied there to your text?
If I set Horizontal Scale to a negative number for example, I can reproduce exactly what you are currently seeing.

[heyix01]

Thanks for your reply, Mark.

Yes a have made some adjustments - you can see below. My text needs to be shrinked / condensed down in oder to fit in it's space.

[markw]

Sadly I’m afraid I don’t know any way to stop this happening with text paths if you change a fonts natural horizontal scale.
For now all I can suggest would be to use an alternative, more naturally condensed font instead, if possible. Or even a slight revision to the design to give yourself more text room?
Is this effect unavoidable when changing a font’s horizontal scale on a curved path? Or a bug? I don’t know, someone from Serif would have to answer that.

[heyix01]

Thanks for your kind help, Mark.
There is no other font style that can be used or that fits in that space. I have to use this font one for my customer and I always have to shrink it down a bit into the usable space.

I tried the same in the latest Illustrator CC (23.0.3) and as you can see AI handels the letters correctly and aligns every letter perpendicular to the circle. So it could be a bug in AF-Designer.

How can we escalate it to serif? Do they read these forums and will pick it out or do we / I habe to adress them directly - and how?

Thanks, Ralf

[firstdefence]

They are watching, the best avenue is here: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/forum/52-feature-requests-suggestions-discussions/

[heyix01]

Thanks firstdefence, I summed this tread up and placed it there.

[MEB]

Hi heyix01,
Welcome to Affinity Forums
One way to solve this if you don't mind to convert the text to curves (so make sure there's no errors upfront and create a copy of the editable object attached to the curve just in case) is to select all the letters inside the group after the curves conversion (menu Layer > Convert to Curves), switch to the Move Tool, enable Transform Objects Separately in the context toolbar and adjust (rotate) one of the letters to align it correctly to the circle. All the others will be adjusted the same amount/accordingly.

[R C-R]

Just curious, but would leaving the tracking & horizontal scale at the defaults & using a smaller point size + a larger vertical scale do as a workaround? Changing either of the scales significantly will distort the proportions of the font's glyphs anyway, so this might be acceptable, at least in some cases.

[PixelPest]

I´m under the impression it´s something with the font. I tried a dozen fonts (out of hundreds) and wasn´t able to reproduce that kind of behaviour at large and very tiny scale; all works as expected. Maybe the path? But it´s just 2 points for a curve - normally - for me.

[R C-R]

20 minutes ago, PixelPest said:

I´m under the impression it´s something with the font. I tried a dozen fonts (out of hundreds) and wasn´t able to reproduce that kind of behaviour at large and very tiny scale; all works as expected. Maybe the path? But it´s just 2 points for a curve - normally - for me.

I can duplicate the behavior when using less than 100% horizontal scaling, but to see it, I have to zoom in quite a bit. Apparently, what Affinity does for path text is to use the rightmost edge of the character's baseline for the fit to the path, which produces the tilt (like can be seen for the "M" in the OP's first screenshot).

Also, depending on the font, this can be obscured a bit by glyphs with rounded lower extents that extend below the baseline ("overshoot"), as mentioned here.

[heyix01]

7 hours ago, R C-R said:

Just curious, but would leaving the tracking & horizontal scale at the defaults & using a smaller point size + a larger vertical scale do as a workaround? Changing either of the scales significantly will distort the proportions of the font's glyphs anyway, so this might be acceptable, at least in some cases.

Wow, that suggestion works! Thanks, R C-R.

[PixelPest]

7 hours ago, R C-R said:

Apparently, what Affinity does for path text is to use the rightmost edge of the character's baseline

Good catch - and it tend to the leftmost edge on Horizontal Scale values greater than 100%.

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, PixelPest said:

Good catch - and it tend to the leftmost edge on Horizontal Scale values greater than 100%.

Also a good catch.