I've been working on official seal designs, which requires text to be placed on the inside or outside of an arc or circle. Inkscape 0.48 seems to handle only the most basic treatment of TrueType fonts in this application, allowing one to rotate the text block around the arc center, change the font size and adjust the kerning. However, I have not been able to find a way to adjust the character width, a feature that is absolutely essential to replicate seals created with other software, such as Adobe Illustrator, or from scans and photographs. As a result, I've been resorting to creating the text arcs with AutoCAD R14 or Adobe Illustrator 9, running on a couple of old Windows 98 machines, then exporting the paths to Inkscape as DXF files or Illustrator SVG files. In fact, Adobe Illustrator absolutely outclasses Inkscape in this area, as far as I've been able to determine. Nonetheless, I'd prefer to be able to do all work on one computer, namely my Linux machine, using Inkscape exclusively, if possible. I also have Dassault Systèmes "DraftSight" CAD software on the Linux machine, which can be pressed into service for serious geometry work that is beyond the capabilities of either Inkscape or Illustrator, and is capable of exporting SVG files.

A Web search so far has yielded no answers to my problem. A search of this forum has also yielded no answers, as the people who set up the forum programmed it to reject search terms such as "text" and "path" as being "too common".

Suggestions welcome. If Inkscape doesn't have the capability of adjusting text width along an arc or path, it's a feature that absolutely needs to be added for it to be a serious contender in graphic design.

Hello:

Suggestions welcome. If Inkscape doesn't have the capability of adjusting text width along an arc or path, it's a feature that absolutely needs to be added for it to be a serious contender in graphic design.

Well, there a lot of features that Inkscape doesn't have, I can't argue that. On the other hand, programming requires a lot of effort, knowledege, and i think most important: time. I know that We the users, really can't be more involved in the development of new features because of the lack of one or more of those characteristics. I'm trying to say: more help, and constructive critic are always welcome.
- At the moment, there are LPE: Live Path effects. Maybe a idea is also have a LTE (Live Text Effect), a more general approach to the objective that I believe you want. I don't know if Illustrator has this kind of features.
- There is the option of converting the text put in the circle to a path : try Object to Path (Shif+Ctrl+C). After that your text is converted in a group of paths, one for every letter. After that, you can ungroup the paths and work with the nodes of each path, or do the transformations that you want. Of course, after that it's almost impossible to revert the changes again to a text, you can undo your steps, but intermediate steps are lost. And it's a time consuming process. But I believe you can get the results that you want by the means of this process.
- A petition: It could help to all, if you post a tutorial showing us what are you trying to do. I believe it will be helpful.

Greeting