Month: July 2011

I’ve been playing with different ways that Inkscape can be used to warp text and thought I would share a few images. This was all motivated by a discussion during an SVG working group meeting a couple of weeks ago on what the proper way to stretch glyphs when placed along a path. (At the moment only Opera can do it and it uses a rather simple algorithm.) You can find a more detailed discussion of this topic at my web site. The most successful experiments were those using the Envelope Deformation Live PathEffect. Only the top and bottom control paths were used (the right and left paths were disabled). For the text within circles, the circles were drawn using the Arc/Circle tool and then pasted in using the LPE editor. Note, you need to be using a modern browser capable of displaying SVG.

I got a surprise when opening an SVG file in emacs in Fedora 15 to do a little editing. I didn’t see the expected SVG source but instead saw a rendering of the SVG. Cool…. but one problem: How DO you edit the source? A quick Internet search led to aa Emacs Wiki page where the solution could be found: Use Ctrl-c Ctrl-c to switch back between editing and rendering modes. SVG rendering only works on a fairly recent version of emacs and only, it appears, on systems using X11. It uses the rather unloved librsvg2 library so don’t expect perfect rendering. The Wiki page also shows how you can control Inkscape directly from emacs if you have a DBUS enabled version of Inkscape. Hmm.