Hi, all,
one of the things that’s been going through my head recently has been running text along a path (you can do this in Illustrator and InDesign, for example). So I decided to see if an Action to achieve this in Freeway using web technologies would be viable. After a false start (I was trying to manipulate HTML directly - this is where madness begins), it became apparent that SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) may be the way to go. As far as what I was trying to achieve, this seemed to be more efficient.
So, I have an Action under development that takes a Link Map Path and runs text along it. Freeway’s output is converted into an SVG element, with styles (both the enclosing
and sub styles in spans) preserved (so far, colours and font styles - but no doubt more as I continue down this particular route). Links are also converted to SVG compatible links.
Still quite a way to go with this, but I’ve been mentioning this quite a bit on Twitter, so I thought I’d post here now I have something more concrete to show.
Here’s a link to an simple example. This shows what the layout looks like in Freeway - there’s a screen grab below.
http://www.worldofpaul.com/textoncurve/experimentaltext.html
It]s pretty easy to construct - draw a link map line, apply the Action to an HTML item containing text and select the path. The Action does the rest.
A more advanced example is here (it also uses my Text Flow Action to bend the copy to the right to fit):
http://www.worldofpaul.com/textoncurve/master1.html
Both pages were fairly straightforward to construct, and so far there is no need for the user to hand code anything. I hope to keep it that way.
The downside (if this can really be counted as one) is that SVG is not supported in IE8 and below, so I may have to do some feature sniffing in Modernizr to swap content to plain old HTML.
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