Text Along Path

1. Create a new canvas at 400 x 200 with a background color of white.

2. Go to the Tools Floating Panel and select the Pen Tool. We are going to create a curved line. The pen tool is a little like playing connect the dots. In our case we need a start point and an end point for our line. If you want to try it click anywhere on the canvas and then click in a different location, you will see how the line is drawn automatically. For this tutorial we are just going to make a horizontal curved line.

Start of by clicking on the left of the canvas. On the opposite end of the canvas, click to make the line... But instead of clicking and releasing the mouse you will hold the mouse button down and move the cursor to curve out the line. You will also see that while you are dragging the pen tool, it has created handles that you can got manipulate. You should have something like the image below.

Once you have a curve to the line along with the handles, go ahead and go to the Tools Floating Panel and select the Subselection Arrow (It's the white arrow). Click on the line to highlight it. Now click on the right point. You should see the handles pop up. You can now adjust the line to get a nice clean curve. You should have something similar the the image below.

3. Now that we have our line that our text will follow, lets get some text. Go to the Tools Floating Panel Select the Text Tool. Click on the canvas to get the text editor to pop up. Once it is up, type in your text and click OK. We now have a curved line and our text on the canvas. I chose to use UltraWeaver.com as my text. You can use what you like.

4. Now its time to get our text to follow our curved line. Go to the Edit on the main menu and choose Select All. Both the text and the line should be highlighted. Now go to the Text option on the main menu and select Attach to Path. You see your text now follows the path of the line. You should now have something like this.

Additional Notes: That's basically it. You can have text follow shapes too. Instead of the line you can draw a circle with the "Circle Tool" to have text follow a circular path. Try it on different shapes.

You can also experiment with transforming text to give it some depth like I did with the ultraweaver.com logo and a sphere (top of page). To do this select your text and go to the "Tools Floating Panel" Select the "Skew Tool". You should now see Handles around the object. Manipulate the handles to achieve the effect you want.

End of tutorial.

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