Aligning centre bracket precisely in type on a path

It's my experience with typography that any mathematical alignment will look bad.

You always have to align them visually.

As nearly as I can figure it, it's about ±.75°. It can be annoying, yes, but I've never encountered a situation when the alignment of letters was that critical. No, I haven't found a way to overcome that particular quirk, but it is real, and it's not just you.

Peter

I'm not sure I understand what you're describing. Do you have a visual image of the problem?

I have plenty of complaints about the limitations of how text objects that are not columns of body copy can be sized, positioned and aligned in relation to other objects. I have to do a bunch of stupid work-arounds just to OPTICALLY center-align a single line piece of text on an object, be it a small label or a big sign. Illustrator won't let users easily do it based on the cap-height of the lettering.

I'm not a big fan of text on path effects due to how wacky and crooked the text can look. I only seem to get the best results by setting the type small, using compressed typefaces and with really loose tracking. That's one way to get around the usually crooked looking results when wrapping text along a circle in a seal-style emblem.

Another solution is converting the text to outlines and turning it into an art brush. It takes a bit of a picky approach to get the right results. I'll go so far as getting the path length of the segment where I want the text to flow and creating a text object that fills that same exact length on a horizontal line before turning it into an art brush. Just to ensure the vertical alignment is dead-on I'll include a dummy object in the lettering that is taller than anything else yet centered along the cap height line. When I apply the art brush to the desired target path it comes out pretty much perfect. There are pros and cons to this approach. The pros side of it: all of the horizontal elements of the text will follow the curve of the path perfectly. No wacky, crooked, unpredictable letters. The con side is some warping of the lettering will occur since all of the vertical lines of lettering will be 90 degrees from that point on the curve. Different typefaces stand up to that warping better than others.