Manipulating text pathways on the surface of 3D objects

I want to produce text on flat surfaces but wish to “write” in a curve eg quarter or half circle. So far I have only done so by rotating single words or individual letters but this is very laborious. Is there any way of typing a line of text and then “bending” it to produce writing that follows a curved pathway ?
I’ve seen the process solution in Pro but am working with SU Make 2017

What is it you’re modeling?

You can create 3D Text and bend it with an extension like Shape Bender, True Bend, of FredoScale. That will tend to deform the text but that’s something you can do without manually rotating individual glyphs.

What ‘process solution have you seen in Pro’…As @DaveR said, you can use extensions in Make and ‘Bend’ the text. There may be some distortion.

I know this is a workaround but if you have access to a tool like Adobe Illustrator, it gives much better control of the curved text than SU would:

Then ‘Create Outlines’ to convert to lines:

Then Export to DXF (can Make import DXF? I don’t have Make but I read online it can). Import and use an extension like Eneroth’s FaceCreator to fill in all the faces at once:

Extrude from there:

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No. Make doesn’t import .dxf files.

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Well than all the more reason to upgrade! Are the Cyber Week deals still going on :wink:

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Eric’s suggestion is good. I’ve use Inkscape to create curved text since it will also export .dxf.

You could get a subscription to SketchUp Go which gives you the .dxf import feature.

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Here is a similar result with Shapebender

A little distortion on the T but that can be corrected. I’m no Shapebender pro so perhaps there’s trick to get more accurate curve/bend.

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There’s something funky with that curve that you’re bending along - the segments aren’t uniform somehow (the two on the ends are shorter), so it’s bending that first item more than the other items. The other thing is that the text is outside the bounds of the original line, so it’s getting extra distortion in that first area.

I tried to recreate that here.

The other thing is you could increase the number of segments in that curve that you’re bending along. When there are more segments it makes the the slices smaller and reduces distortion

You still get some distortion just due to the fact that you’re…bending it, but it’s a lot smoother result

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Thanks for ideas guys. Think I’ll first try creating curved text outside SU with a couple of progs I know a bit then importing and see if that does what I want . If not I’ll see if I can figure out how to get an extension . never having done that before. I shall be slow in trying and replying as my SU time is going to be patchy for a bit.
Thanks again
Ken