How do interactive text kerning, line spacing, and arching work in VCarve Pro & Aspire?

Overview

The Text Selection tool goes well beyond basic font placement. It adjusts kerning (letter spacing), line spacing and arching directly on the text in the 2D view, so professional-looking sign text is achievable without leaving the software. When text is selected with this tool it is shown as magenta lines with two green handles in the middle for arching. (Placing text on a vector curve is covered in the Text on a Curve entry.)

Interactive Kerning (Letter Spacing)

How to access: select the text with the Text Selection tool. Place the cursor between two letters; a kerning cursor appears. Kerning can only be edited in the 2D view.

A typical use is the capital letters W, A and V next to each other, where the default gap looks too big.

Important rules:

• Kerning is applied to live text. Text that has been converted to curves is no longer text and cannot be kerned this way.
• After kerning you can still go back and edit the text with Create Text.

Interactive Line Spacing

Place the cursor between two lines of text and it changes to the line spacing cursor. Click to move the adjacent lines closer together, Shift + Click to move them apart. Hold Ctrl to double the distance each click moves, and Ctrl + Shift together to move the lines apart in larger increments.

Interactive Arc (Arching)

With the Text Selection tool active on selected text, two green handles appear:

• Drag the top green handle to arc the text upward.
• Drag the bottom green handle to arc the text downward.
• Drag the handle back to return the text to horizontal.

After arcing, extra handles appear:

• White handles: move the text. One is in the middle of the text and one is at the center of the arc (which may be off-screen for very shallow arcs).
• Red handles: rotate the text around the center point of the arc. Hold Ctrl to rotate in 15 degree steps, which lets you land exactly on the horizontal or vertical quadrants.
• Blue handles: change the arc radius without moving the arc center.

Note: arched text and text placed on a curve are mutually exclusive. If the selected text was placed on a curve, the arching handles do not appear.

Related text tools

• Text in a Box (a mode of Create Text) fits text to a bounding box. See the text tools entry.
• Single Line engraving fonts are chosen with the Single Line radio button in Create Text.
• Convert Text to Curves makes the text editable as vectors, after which it can no longer be edited as text or kerned this way. Script fonts with overlapping characters can be welded to clean up overlaps before V-carving.