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  May 14 , 2000

Centering Text within a Ring

FreeHand's default settings when joining text to an ellipse give separate baseline and ascent settings for the upper and lower text. The method shown below makes visually centering the text within a ring easier. You never have to adjust the path. You use the same baseline shift for upper and lower text.

FreeHand 8 and above does a pretty good job of adjusting the spacing of text on curved paths. For earlier versions, the following method will help even out letter spacing.

Version: 4 and above

 
 


Tip idea and art provided by: Judy Arndt
Content written by Judy Arndt and edited by Ian Kelleigh

1) First, place two intersecting guides at the center of the design. Turn on Snap to Guides. Then with the Ellipse tool, draw two ellipses by Option (Alt)-Dragging from intersection of guides.

 

2) Select both ellipses and Join them into a composite path. Next assign a fill and remove any strokes to form the background ring.

To help with working on the project, it may help to put this ring on it's own layer and move it behind the other layers then lock it. Also, lock any other layers so you don't accidentally change something on them later on.

 

3) Now create another new layer. This is where we'll be adding the text on a ring.

For the text path, draw another ellipse centered between the outer borders of the ring like shown above. You can turn off the guides at this point if you like.

 

4) Start with text in a separate text block so you can quickly adjust text size, font and color. Choose Centered text alignment.

 

5) Select the path and the Text box then go in the Text Menu and choose Attach to Path.

Above is what FreeHand shows by default. Now we'll make the text centered in the Yellow area better.

 

6) Select the path with text. In the Object Inspector palette enter:

  • Top: Baseline
  • Bottom: Baseline
  • Orientation: Rotate around path
  • Show path Turned on

 

7) Now you can edit the Baseline shift one of two ways. One way is shown above using the Text Inspector palette. Just select the path with the text and in the palette, change the Baseline shift amount (measurements shown in points). You can also adjust the Range kerning and Font size if needed. We want to lower the text baseline until the path sits halfway through the height of the tallest letters.

The second method is using Keyboard shortcuts. First double-click on the text, then select all. Use Command+Option (Control+Alt) +Down Arrow to shift baseline down, Command+Option (Control+Alt) +Right Arrow to increase range kerning and Command (Control)+Shift+> to enlarge the text.

 

8) Select the path with the text and in the Object Inspector, turn off the Show path option.

Then add the final touches to the art as needed.

You can further play with this kind of effect by changing the text Orientation on the path. Using the Skew options for example, makes for some pretty interesting text effects.