Imagine:
* instead of "ordinary" guidelines for writing text (like in the grade-school paper printing "tablets"), you have
* two arbitrary paths (say, a pair depicting a heart, or another forming a crescent moon), and
* your text "fitting" betwixt the two

THEN your text
* could appear to grow from nothing at one intersection (and recede again at the other), and
* could be painted with a gradient (as discussed elsewhere in these pages) to grow and recede that way as well

Hello, and best wishes to all the regulars, and to the newbs, whom I strongly encourage to look around and drink deeply.

@saulgoode

Many (many) thanks. (Impressive that it is more general than a mere two curves... kudos)

"GimpChat suffers from an 'embarrasment of geniuses.'"

I off myself to give it a college try or several.

I am off myself to...

gramp when you use that script be sure and use only 4 nodes and start with UPPER LEFT then run the script.
It works much better that way. Still slow but worth the wait for sure.

Thanks, Rod. Will watch.

I do "slow" equally as well as sg & ofnuts & roba do scripts!

zzzzzzzzz

wow.

You guys need to give this a try--just to watch what-goes-on.

The new path created is most, satisfyingly, bizarre.

We know.

Thanks, Rod.

I interpret the direction to mean START drawing the 4-point Bezier curve with the UPPER LEFT point and proceed CLOCKWISE with defining the remaining three points and closing the curve.

My impression from observing the behavior of the script is that it appears to proceed, letter-by-letter, left-to-right, "scanning" each top-to-bottom "between" the top and bottom curves, and then uses that information to fit the character before proceeding.

After some surprises that looked just crazy, I guessed (wrongly or not) that I could help myself and the script by making the text in my text layer "pre-fit" the Bezier at least reasonably. Text which is "too long" or "too short" is probablylematic. (Indeed, in my very last experiment, I dropped one letter off the end of the phrase, and an artifact disappeared.)

Heck, for all I know THAT might even be in the instructions. :^)

I'm'attach a screencap. I'm'aim for text "arising from the mists of the distant past and returning to the mists of the distant future." A real artist will no doubt have oodles of different ways to convey the idea. Heck, faik this might be in Art101, Ch. 1. But I had to give up "books" way back when I was only old, and now I am older. (I don't always read bumperstickers clear to the end.)

BTW, taking to heart O's long-running exhortation: the font I used is: Romande ADF Std Semi-Bold.

Holy crap how long did that take to render gramps.
Yes start point top left node. I thought Saulgoode was going to add more node options?

Even accounting for the fact that time is like a jet stream for me, it was surprisingly quick, I think because the opposing curves were pretty "straight" after all.

I think it's fun to watch the script proceed, making one letter at a time.

But then. I don't have cable.