Victory with Vectors; or How to Create Curved Text with PSP7
November 3, 2000
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Creating vector text can be as simple or as complicated as you
want to make it. For most of us, creating text on a path and
fitting existing text to a path is all we'll ever need. For the
adventurous, there is a brief introduction to
converting text to curves
included at the end of this article.
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Creating Text on a Path
First you're going to need a curve on which to place the text.
With the Preset Shape Tool draw a circle on a new canvas. If your
background color is turned off on the color palette you will get
an outline of a circle, if the foreground is off and the background
color on you will get a solid circle. Which you decide on is
unimportant for this exercise as we'll be turning the vector shape
off for the final result.
Switch to the Text Tool. When you move your cursor over the image
you'll notice that it changes to the Curved Text Cursor. This is the
time to click. If you click to open the text dialog box while the
normal cursor is showing your text will be inserted into your image
as a straight line.
Most of the items in the text dialog box will be self explanatory,
but there are a few items that bear explanation. Leading is the
space between lines. Not only does it increase/decrease space between
the lines of text, but it can be used to position text on a curve.
Positive values will place the text below the line while negative
values will place it above the line.
Working with text on a curve, you will eventually run into the problem
where the letters will overlap each other as they bend around the
curve. This is where Kerning comes in handy. Kearning is the
space between the letters. Higher numbers increase the space
between letters, lower numbers decrease it.
In the example, I had the Auto Kern check box to use the default
kerning values.
The Styles and Texture boxes are not something I'm going to go into
at this time. For now, if you just click on the Standard
Text button, a nice flat text in the color displayed will
appear on your circle.
In the Create As box, select the Vector radio button and
make sure that Antialias is checked. If you haven't already done so,
type some text and click OK.
Cool! We've got text in a circle but we've also got that
circle and we really don't want it there. Not a problem, getting
rid of that line is as easy as clicking a button!
Locate the layer that contains your text and vector object. If
you've followed this example you should only have a background and
one layer. Expand the layer and click the Visibility button
of the object so that it appears crossed out.
Add a transparency and your circled text is finished!
Fitting Existing Text to Object (Path)
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