 |
Let's start with the default values. First choose a nice chunky
font, and then enter your text. Set your font size to that of
the title font, around 100 pixels. If we run Text Circle, we can now
see what the radius, start and fill angle refer to. The radius is
the size of the circle measured from the centre outwards. The start
angle is the position of the "W", in this case 0 degrees=12
o'clock. The fill angle is where the end of your text will finish,
in this case 360 degrees means it will entirely close the circle,
as the screen shot shows. |
 |
Clearly, we need to start further to the left of the zero
degree position. To do this, we need to put a negative start
value, the maximum leftwards we could start is 180 degrees, or
around 6 o'clock. Let's try a little less than half that, to give
us a starting position of approximately 10 o'clock, or -80 degrees.
We now need to decide the end point for our text. This is
determined by the fill angle. The fill angle should be thought of
as how far round the circle you want to go. We want to go to about
2 o'clock. Now what is that fill value? You might think that it
follows the the logic of the starting angle, but you'd be wrong!
Try putting the angle you think represents 2 o'clock, let's say 80
degrees. One final point is to increase the radius of our circle,
as obviously our text will now no longer fit in our much smaller
arc as opposed to the whole circle. Let's increase it four fold,
to a value of 320. This gives us a nice shallow arc and the result
on the left.
|
|
Aaargh! What went wrong? Well, fill angle is different to the
start angle. Fill angle is how much of the circle the text should
fill. What we've said is just under a quarter, when what we wanted
was just under half a circle, or about 170 degrees. However, as we
started a little higher than exactly horizontal, half a circle
would take us too far, so let's reduce it still further to 160
degrees. Now the result is closer to what we're after. |
|
But we're still not there. The curvature is too tight, the
letter spacing too close. We want curvature on a grand scale!
Which naturally results in a smaller segment of circle, in fact
with the final vast radius (500), a tiny arc is is needed, just 90
degrees in fact. Accordingly, the start angle is adjusted to match
this small segment of a much larger circle. The final result is
close enough to work with (shown at 50% of full size).
Now move on to the next lesson...
|
