Curving Text in PSP5

Once you see how easy it is, you'll never believe it! The above example is a little overdone, but, it does get the point across.

For practice purposes, open a blank image 200 X 200 pixels with a white background. Using the shapes tool, set to a circle, outlined, and a color of your choice, make a medium sized circled on your canvas.

Create a new layer. This new layer is going to be where you place your text. You have to do this one letter at a time. For the image above, I used Arial-bold-28. Using the text tool place a letter on your layer.

Turn on the rotate tool, (you'll find it next to the zoom tool on the pallette). This will place the tool on your letter. Put you mouse over the image until it shows the rotate icon and rotate your letter to fit the curve of the circle you made on the first layer.

Continue in that manner until you have your letters around your curve. When you are done, on the layers pallette, select the background layer. Using the shapes tool, with the color white, cover up your template circle.

You don't have to use a circle. You can use your line tool and make a bezier curve to use as a template also. There are many ways to get the curve you want, and as you can see, curving the text is easy.

NOTE:  If you are using a particularly skinny letter, for instance, an "i", the rotate icon may not show on your letter. In this case you need to widen the letter, rotate it, then make it skinny again. You can do all that with the rotate tool.