Hi!
I am currently trying to wrap text around a circle after I’ve modified it (added a gradient and duplicated background/shadow thing). I made some text and then filled it in with a gradient color and then duplicate that layer, and clicked “remove alpha channel” so that I could move it and make it a kind of shadow. Then I merged these two layers together. Now the layers of the used-to-be text layer are no longer text layers so I can’t do “text along path” anymore.
I’ve also tried to put the text along the circle path first and then add the gradient and the shadow effect, but I can’t seem to get the shadow effect (the duplicate text behind the text) to happen on the path. I attached a photo of it below.
Let me know if you need any clarification, thank you!
I tried that and I could get the gradient effect to work, but I unfortunately couldn’t figure out how to add that duplicated image shadow/background effect I have going in that picture I attached
I think the distortion is partly due to the fact the original font is highly italicized, as well as distorted itself. A slightly less distorted italic font might work better in such a tight circle.
to distort pixels around a circle, you have Filters > Distorts > Polar coordinates
otherwise, the usual technique is not to distort the text pixels but a path that represents the text, and then render the distorted path. Distorting the pixels directly would require to “stretch” them and will introduce blur which is very visible on text.
if you go the path route, then:
the “shadow” is not shifted linearly, but is a second rendering of the path after rotating the path (in fact you probably want to rotate “main” and “shadow” path equally in opposite directions
likewise the “main” and “shadow” paths likely have their baselines shifted (which is not the same thing as using circles with different radiuses)
you can still apply the gradient to the result of a rendered path, but the gradient has to be a conical gradient instead of a linear one
last, a major problem I see with your attempts is that your font is very big compared to the circle and has large ascenders/descenders that will get heavily distorted
Okay, I tried the filters > distorts > polar coordinates and I really like the look of it, but I would like to fit “lights” in there if I can. As well as, how do i get it to be a bigger circle that it’s going around? Pic below!
Also, in response to the font, I took off bold, but it is still distorted as its original font:/ And, I do want the font to circle around the path as a large font if that’s possible, but I’ll give it a try as well.
I tried making the font a lot smaller so that the text would have more of a chance not getting distorted. But, it still got a bit distorted. The roundness of the letters is not as clean, also there’s this weird clipping of colors that happens where the letters overlap. I don’t know what that’s about?
Honestly, the polar coordinates filter thing looks the best out of everything I’ve tried. I just need “lights” in there and for the circumference to be much larger…
I haven’t said so yet, but I really appreciate all the input, thank you :))
ofn-text-along-path will wrap a text along a path but instead of distorting the letters it just rotates them. There is also a raft of useful options (such as centering the text, positioning it relative to the path (baseline tweak…), running backwards on the path (bottom text)…
ofn-text-path-selection will correctly make a selection from a text path, even if there is an overlap of characters.
Both scripts found here. Installation instruction at bottom of page. Each ZIP contains a HTML doc explaining how the script works. Enjoy.
