Text on a Path

PSP provides you with the ability to make text conform to a curved path. Folks who used to rotate and move individual letters to get this effect will be particularly impressed by how easy it now is to get text on a path.

What you do to make text conform to a path is to define a path by drawing a vector line or preset vector shape and then to "attach" vector text to the path:

1. Begin by making your path. For this example, let's draw a sort of S-shaped Bézier curve for our path. Choose the Draw tool and in the Color palette set the Stroke to a solid color and set the Fill to Null. In the Tool Options palette, select Bezier Curve as the Type; be sure that Create as vector is selected.

   

2. To begin the path, click a little more than halfway down on your image canvas, a few pixels to the right of the left edge. Then drag horizontally to a few pixels away from the right edge. Define the curve's first control point by clicking below the line, on the left. Then define the second control point by clicking above the line, on the right.

   

3. Release the mouse button. Your vector curve will be drawn and selected:

   

4. Now choose the Text tool. Position the tool anywhere on your vector curve. When the tool is positioned correctly, the A of the cursor icon will tilt to the left with a curve below it:

   

   Click on your vector curve when the cursor is positioned correctly.
5. You'll then see the Text Entry dialog box.

   Choose the font and font size that you want. In the Create as pane, you can select either Vector, Selection, or Floating; you can also select Antialias here, if you like.

   In the Styles pane, set Stroke to Null and set Fill to the color you want your text to be. You can also choose to have your text bolded (B), italicized (I), underlined (U), or struck-through (A).

   Choose the alignment of your text. Align Left will position your text so that it begins at the curve's left end; Center will center the text on the curve; and Right Align will position the text so that it ends at the curve's right end.

   Enter the text that you want in the Enter Text Here text box.

   

6. After you press OK, you'll then see something like this:

   

   Notice that if you used vector text, both the curve and the text are selected. You can move, resize, or deform them just as you can any other vector object. (See Vector Basics for details.) You can also modify the curve with Node Edit, which we'll look at in a later tutorial.
7. Of course, you probably don't want the curve itself to be visible. There are a couple ways to make the path invisible. If you expand the vector layer info on the Layer palette, you can just click the visibility toggle on the curve's Object button:

   

   Another alternative is to access the curve's Properties dialog box and deselect Visible:

   

   You can access a vector object's properties in three ways:

   • Double-click on the object's Layer button on the Layer palette.
   • Right-click on the object's Layer button on the Layer palette, then select Properties from the resulting menu.
   • Choose the Vector Object Selection Tool, select the object you're interested in (either by clicking its Layer button or by dragging the tool across the object), and then right-click anywhere within the object selection border and select Properties.

   Here's our example with the path invisible and the text object deselected: