Re: Curving text

At 4:14 PM 12/6/98, John R. Cox wrote:
> Can someone please help me figure out how to make the text curve
> around the outside edge of a citcular object? I have Photoshop 5,
> Illustrator 7 and Paintshop Pro 5.

If memory serves, then Illustrator 8 added some of the directional controls
for text-on-a-path that FreeHand had for years. You could then make the
text, save it out, import it to Photoshop, colorize it, save it out, and
bring it to a compression utility before saving the final copy of the file.

(If you're in ILL7, then I don't recall whether you had the skewing or
alignment functions for curved text... there were difficulties in some
types of designs back then. If this is the root cause of the problem there,
then I'm not sure how you can achieve the goal with that tool, regrets.)

It may be faster to just download the fully-functional 30-day trial version
of Fireworks from the Macromedia website. It handles text-on-a-path
superbly, and colorizes quite richly, and integrates animation and
compression as well. Better yet, you can change the text or its path and
generate a new GIF within two minutes, instead of wading through multiple
files as with the older "studio" approach.

Rephrased, you should be able to achieve your goal today, with multiple
tools. If you'll be doing this a lot, though, then there are savings
possible when using a single tool devoted to web graphics.

Is it the skewing that's hanging you up? Or is it just learning those
various tools? Or...?

jd

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