Text on a curve makes me prematurely grey and bald

Is there a decent tutorial out there for putting text on a curve?

I can get the text here, often upside down. Using the controls to flip the text moves the text away from the curve. Thereafter positioning the text is as much fun as pulling out my teeth with a rusty spoon.

Please save my teeth and my hair by pointing me to a good tutorial on using this feature efficiently.

Sean


  • I can get the text here, often upside down

    drag the text and/or use the "mirror" icons on the Property bar

  • Look here. this is from X8 but the same in X7.

  • Hello Sean,


    Fit text to path has always been an issue in CorelDRAW especially as Corel isn’t very concerned about precision as other software are.
    So it takes a little bit of understanding font size and measurements, do a little math, and you can get close to what you want to achieve in terms of aligning the text on the path.

    A typical scenario would be where some text is required to be placed on the top and bottom of a given circle. When the text is on the bottom of the circle, it gets inverted, which is understandable as it is rotated along the edge to the bottom. The problem arises when the text has to remain upright and also be centered at the bottom while maintaining the exact same distance from the path as the text on the top of the circle has.

    Before I get to the how-to, a little info on fonts.
    Typeface design usually follow some basic guides in most cases as below.
    Ascender line: Height to which the ascenders on letters like 'h, d, l', extend up from the baseline.
    Cap line: General height of Capital Letters
    x-height: General height of lowercase letters
    baseline: The base line on which all the letter are aligned
    Descender line: Height to which the descenders on letters like 'g, j, p', etc extend down from the baseline.
    Overshoot: Some letters like 'n, m, o' etc have a slight offset from the X-height or baseline, where the curved part of the letter extends very slightly over or below the respective x-height or baseline. This is the overshoot.

    Now thats a very rough description, but I hope you get the idea.

    For our purposes we need to know
    1. x-height
    2. ascender height, and
    3, x-height + descender height


    Now to align text on the path using x-height: (You can later experiment using the ascender and descender, or Cap height values if you have such a requirement)

    1. Always keep a copy of the text you are going to fit to the path.
    2. Set the horizontal alignment of the text to center.
    3. Type the letter 'x' using the same font and size of the text you are fitting to the circle, in an arbitrary position of the page. This is for  checking the height.
    4. Check the height of this text on the property bar (the letter 'x') and note it down. Let us call this value X. This is NOT the font size, but the height in inches or mm as per the page units.


    Aligning to the top of the circle is relatively easy.
    1. Fit text to path.
    2. Type in the Distance from Path value you need. Let us call this value D. (You need this value for the next part.)
    3. Set Offset value to 0.
    Done. The text should now be aligned centered at the top of the circle.

    Now for the bottom of the circle.
    1. Fit the text approximately to the bottom of the circle.
    2. Mirror the text horizontally and vertically so that it is upright and reads left to right.
    3. Set the offset distance to X+D. These are the values from above, x-height(X) and distance from path (D).
    4. With the Pick tool, left-click on the text, till only the text is selected. Now left-click and HOLD,... AND PRESS AND HOLD Shift key.
    5.With the shift key depressed, drag the text along the circle till it snaps to a red line glyph that appears when the text is centered at the bottom of the circle. Holding down the Shift Key while dragging keeps the Distance from Path locked to what you set.
    6. Let go of mouse button, Done.

    I mentioned earlier to set the horizontal alignment of the text to be set as centered. This was necessary, as you can now adjust the kerning for the letters and the text will remain aligned and centered as you adjust kerning.

    Hope I explained all this, in a way that can be understood.