Text on an unusual curve

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
October 23, 2017
6 replies
742 views

Hi Forum

I hope you can help me?

I'm creating artwork for a square drinks coaster. It's 95mm square and with 25% radius corners.

The problem is that when i create the text on the curve it visually looks so wrong!

Letters are splayed out and look very awkward.

is there a way around this so that the letters visually look spot on?

Many thanks

Sammi

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer Mike_Gondek10189183

Make sure you are familiar with

type >> type on a path > options

this is very useful when making type follow a path.

If you have tight curves is hard to make look good, so we really need to see what you are working on.

As mentioned use manual kerning, tracking or horizontal scaling can help adjust or hide what is going on in the corners.

barbara_a7746676

Community Expert

The larger the point size of the type and the more acute the radius on the corners, the more difficult to make the type look even. You may even need to do a little tweaking with the Touch Type tool.

If you can manage it with the text you need to work with, Mike Gondik's idea to avoid the issue altogether would be a clever way to go.

Mike_Gondek10189183

Correct answer

Community Expert

Make sure you are familiar with

type >> type on a path > options

this is very useful when making type follow a path.

If you have tight curves is hard to make look good, so we really need to see what you are working on.

As mentioned use manual kerning, tracking or horizontal scaling can help adjust or hide what is going on in the corners.

barbara_a7746676

Community Expert

Its normal for text on a curve to not look quite right, because all the kerning and tracking values built into a font are optimized for standard straight text.

As Debbie suggested, you'll need to adjust the kerning values. You could start by selecting all the text and changing the kerning to Optical or Metrics (instead of Auto, which is the default). That should give you an improvement. If you need to tweak the kerning values further, click an insertion point between two characters and adjust accordingly..