Affinity Designer putting text on a path

[sbonsell71]

I use this feature a lot and have never understood how it works - help section provides no useful answers. What is the significance of the Red, orange, green triangles? I have tried to work it out many times and every single time I think I have a theory it confounds me. Thanks for any help

 

Just tried to look at it again. Makes no sense.

[walt.farrell]

Have you looked at the Text on a Path help topic, and specifically the subtopic "Modifying Path Text"? It explains those triangles and what they do.

[sbonsell71]

Hi Walt - yes, I have - but when things go wrong (e.g. when experimenting/editing, particularly when changing text size) the Help topics just don't work. Most of the time I just re-draw the line and re-write the entire text. Occasions when, for example, there appears to be two of each triangle on one line - with no identifier as to which triangles are linked to which text , just trial and error, moving one triangle and seeing what happens to the text. I guess that whenever I see help files that only discuss one, simple, example I'm suspicious of the function's capability ..

Some work I'm doing this morning ...

Screenshot 1

 

I want to push the text along the line - about 5mm. So my intuition is to use the green arrow which will move it along 5mm. You can see at the end of the line (the orange arrow) shows that a 5mm move should NOT push the text over the end of the line.

 

Screenshot 2

Simply by selecting the green arrow and moving it 1mm Screenshot 2 happens: I now have two green arrows, two red arrows, the text is upside down and no amount of trying different techniques achieves what I wanted to do. So, I will just do it again from scratch. That doesn't make for good workflow.

[walt.farrell]

Thanks for the screenshots. The inversion of the text should mean that you moved it too far, and went beyond the end of the path, so it flowed around onto the other side.

But I can't explain it any further without actually having your .afdesign file. I agree that from screenshot 1 simply moving the green triangle 1mm should not have done that, so something else is involved that can't be seen from the screenshot alone.

[MEB]

Hi sbonsell71,
I've reproduced this behaviour here and will pass this to the dev team (seems it swaps the start/end markers for no reason). Thanks for reporting it.

[Dave Harris]

I believe this is a known bug that has been fixed in the current Publisher beta for 1.7.3. It will be fixed in Designer too, when that gets updated.

[MEB]

It's indeed fixed in Affinity Publisher 1.7.3.475. Thanks Dave.