Shorten curved line along its path; text on the arrow path

Question

Is there any way (except by Scissors tool and then deleting the unwanted part of the original line) how to move the ending anchor point of a curved line along the original curved path of the line to trim (shorten) the line? I want to keep the original path curvature.

The purpose of it is to easily adjust the space for the text on the arrow path in case I need to add (or change) text on its path the text.

Ideally, it would be nice to be able to change the curvature of the arrow together with the curvature of the text, but I do not know if this is possible.

Thank you for your answer.

Kurt Gold · Accepted Answer

You can download two knockout approaches and experiment a bit with them.

Type on Path Knockout Sample 1 (Illustrator file, format 2020)

The first expedition uses a stroked type object. The last expedition uses an Object on a Path object that can be scaled and moved along the path to make the appropriate knockout.

Modify the type and move the object on a path (circle) to see what happens.

There are some other ways and I think it was Ton Frederiks who once shared a way that used just a single Type on a Path object to get the right knockouts.

Jacob Bugge · Answer

Matu,

When I first read your question, I noticed that your original path and the shortened end paths had Round Cap and thereby rounded ends, which is more complicated to obtain than a simple cutoff corresponding to Butt Cap.

It is doable, and I looked into fully editable/reversible ways to do it, but then I had some urgent tasks, and left the thread until now.

Normally the simpler cutoff is used, and it also makes the text appear as an integral part of the arrow path, rather than text between two paths, only one being an arrow path.

You could also choose Butt Cap instead of Round Cap for the arrow path with full consistency.

I can see that Kurt has offered a solution easy to use.

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