Distorting text with Inkscape

Hi,

 At last week's WG meeting[1] we discussed textPath method="stretch". It
has been pointed out that the exact way the glyphs are to be distorted
has not been defined. Israel Eisenberg has proposed that glyphs be
distorted so that horizontal lines are "offset mapped" to the path and
he provided some compelling examples.

 Inkscape includes some general path distortion functionality. The
question was raised as to how the distortions are done so I've prepared
a web page to demonstrate some of the ways one can distort paths in
Inkscape. You can find the page at:

 http://tavmjong.free.fr/SVG/TEXT_PATH/TextPath.html

 The short answer is that "extensions" permanently distort a path moving
the nodes and control points  while "live path effects" store the
original path in the Inkscape name space and create a new, distorted
path by first converting a Bezier path to an "SBasis" path, applying the
distortion, and then converting back to a Bezier path that is used in
the SVG <path>.

     Tav

[1] http://www.w3.org/2011/07/14-svg-minutes.html

Received on Thursday, 21 July 2011 19:30:28 UTC