How to make a text follow a shape in a smooth way?

Most accurate way, but most time consuming, is to follow James Bugge's suggestion.

It's handmade

wilsonfredrik,

The PARIS is cumstom made, including rotation of the P and the R (slightly differently).

In order to recreate (something like) it, you can do (what is similar to) this, Smart Guides being your friends:

1) Type PARIS normally, then outline;

2) Add a vertical guide line on top of each letter, starting from the top of the letter and extending as far as the centre of the circle they are to rest upon (the centre shown at the bottom of your screenshot), centred on the letters without a vertical stem (A and S) and following the vertical stem of the others (centred on the P and I and following the right edge on the R), then group each guide line with its letter;

3) Extend the stems/legs of PARI downwards so they end a sufficient bit below the baseline, and leave the S as is;

4) Draw the cutting circle at the S (shown at the bottom of your screenshot) so that its centre is at the bottom of the guide line of the S and so that it only touches the S; then move a copy of it to its final position;

5) Position a copy of each letter/line set (starting with the R and proceeding left and right) with the bottom line ending at the circle centre (snap with Smart Guides), then rotate each letter/line set (except the R) round the circle centre to best visual fit; adjust until the kerning/trackning/distances between the letters look right (disregarding the parts below the circle;

6) Make further adjustments to the angles between the letter when you have all of them placed;

7) Rotate everytning as needed;

😎 Save a backup of the artwork to be able to fall back on it (you can do that in earlier stages as well);

9) Ungroup each letter/line set and delete the guide line;

10) Select the cutting circle and make it the topmost object in the stacking order (you can hold Ctrl/Cmd and press X then F, or move it up in the expanded Layer);

10) Select everything and apply Minus front/Subtract from shape area.

This ought to cut all the letters except the S and give the desired appearance.

Kittl does not distort text on a path. You could give Kittl a try. I haven't used it myself, but I understand that Kittl files can be exported as SVG, which could then be imported into Illustrator.

You can request bug fixes and features to be added to Illustrator. https://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/global/how-to-user-voice.html

You are not alone in wanting text on a path without distortion -- it has been requested for years. Hopefully Adobe will add the feature in an Illustrator update.

Text on a path is a mechanical operation, and can't produce the "organic" treatment you see on the R in the PSG logo. That was positioned and altered manually to produce the final result. There is no way to get that "automatically".