Once again, I’m probably re-inventing the wheel 
I had a need to create some 3D lettering around the edge of a circle and tried manually moving and rotating each character into place. I’ve done this several times in the past, and it’s not much of a problem, but it can take some time when lots of letters are needed. I’m sure that there are plugins for this effect, but I cobbled together one that (eventually) produced this result (text is from Wikipedia article on Kerning):
circular_letters.skp (963.3 KB)
It still needs a little tweaking on the kerning, but it’s more than sufficient for what I was looking for.