You are here: Home » Blog » Archives for text on a path

text on a path

Tutorial Tuesday: Text Boxes

by Steph on 23 October 2012
in Elements (PSE),Photoshop CS+,Tutorials Pin this scrappy stuff!

I am a font junkie. Seriously, I am. And I love to journal. It used to be a pain because I would simply select my Text tool and plop it anywhere on my page and type away. It was hard to make it look right and fit where I wanted it too. And what if I got it looking right and I decided to switch the font? It would mess everything up! So Here starts a little mini-series on the Text Tool and fonts and maybe a little bit on journaling. Hey! I said maybe!  Today- the text box.

If you aren’t using text boxes for your journaling, well, you are making life a little bit harder. Maybe. To make a text box you simply select your text tool- hot key T – and click a point to start and drag on your page. It will look like this- you can now type inside your box, and PS will automatically line up, go to the next line and hyphenate words for you. Nice of photoshop!

But sometimes, our journaling isn’t best put in a box. In this LO I wanted to journal around my elements. I used the polygonal lasso tool -hot key L- to draw my box. *Extra tip* if you hold shift while going from point to point, you will get perfectly straight lines.

Just one more step and our box will be journal ready. We need to make the box a Text Path.  With the marquee tool selected -hot key M- right click and a menu comes up. Select the option Make Work Path. I like to set my path selection at 2.0.

And now you can journal away to your little hearts content! Fun huh? This is the same method we used in the Tut here.

And here is what my LO ended up like. Fun huh? I used a template by me, AKA ScrappyCocoa, come soon to a DSS near you ;) Next week I am going to delve a little deeper into the text tool. We’ll discuss fun things like kerning and stuff. 

10 comments ... Join the conversation!

Tutorial Tuesday: How to do Text On a Path

by Steph on 18 September 2012
in Photoshop CS+,Tutorials Pin this scrappy stuff!

Have you ever wanted to put your journaling around a circle or square or any other shape? Well, this technique is called text on a path. It’s not too hard {yay!} and I am going to show you 2 ways to do it.

Today we are going to be using a circle. But you can do this with any shape. First using the shape tool { “U” } make a circle. Do not rasterize this circle. You will know it isn’t rasterized because you can see the clipping mask in the layers panel {red arrow}

Next, activate your text tool “T”. Hover over the circle. If you hover ON the path {you can see a faint outline} you will see a T with a sort of squiggle. If you were to click now, you would be able to write around the perimeter of the circle. If you hover on the inside, you  will get a slightly different symbol. T with  (). that will let you write IN the circle. Click where you want and type away!

Now, if you don’t want that circle in your LO, simply rasterize it and delete it. Not too bad right?

Ok, but what if said circle is actually on a template and it’s already rasterized? Well lucky for us there is another way to do it! First, put marching ants around your circle. Do this by clicking in the circle in the layers pallet while holding command or control. When you have the circle outlined switch to the Marquee tool “M”. Right click to bring up a little menu. From that menu choose make work path. Next a little box will pop up asking you for a tolerance level. I find the 2 works best.

From here we proceed as before! Switch to your text tool and type away! You can use this technique on any shape, even on letters. Have fun putting your text on a path!

8 comments ... Join the conversation!