Convert textPath to rotated text

7 Sep 2017


      Neighbors,
I have in an e-book a title page formatted with SVG, using <textPath> to
place text along a curve.  To reduce the picture to a minimum example,
consider curvetext.svg:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
    <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"
      xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" version="1.1"
      viewBox="0 0 160 256" width="160" height="256">
      <g style="text-align:center;text-anchor:middle;stroke:none;">
        <path style="fill:none;"
          d="m 0,72 c 32,-16 52,-20 80,-20 28,0 48,4 80,20"
          id="path-upper" />
        <text style="font-size:9px;"
          ><textPath xlink:href="#path-upper" startOffset="50%"><tspan
            >Text to be Placed Along a Curve</tspan></textPath></text>
      </g>
    </svg>
Trouble is, Kindle (among other platforms) doesn’t support <textPath> in
SVG.  I can generate a raster image, but that’s no fun.  But
experimenting with various formats suggests this:
$ inkscape -A curvetext.pdf --export-ignore-filters curvetext.svg
    $ inkscape -l curvetext2.svg curvetext.pdf
And it works, generating lines like
<text
transform="matrix(0.94068351,0.33928532,0.33928532,-0.94068351,17.864857,145.9156)"><tspan
y="0" x="0">T</tspan></text>
    <text
transform="matrix(0.94997891,0.31231406,0.31231406,-0.94997891,20.665461,146.93493)"><tspan
y="0" x="0">e</tspan></text>
    <text
transform="matrix(0.96048875,0.27831882,0.27831882,-0.96048875,24.497618,148.19598)"><tspan
y="0" x="0">x</tspan></text>
    <text
transform="matrix(0.96875188,0.24803186,0.24803186,-0.96875188,28.337099,149.29823)"><tspan
y="0" x="0">t</tspan></text>
Well, the result actually includes a bunch of other boilerplate that
Inkscape likes to add to SVGs (some of which I’ve removed for clarity in
the example above), and also it adds a global transform matrix,
<g transform="matrix(1.3333333,0,0,-1.3333333,0,256)">
around everything and the result is generally odd-looking code.  And
maybe I should just let Inkscape do its thing and not worry about this.
But what I’d really like is to compile down ›just‹ the <textPath> code,
and have it yield something anchored around where the text actually
appears on the page (maybe the start of the <path> at (0,72), or the
midpoint at (80,52), or something plausible).
Is what I’m looking for at all reasonable, and is there some way to
accomplish this with Inkscape?  (I’m prepared to hear “no” to both parts
of my question.)
––Joel C. Salomon

Joel C. Salomon

Marc Jeanmougin

Joel C. Salomon

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