Just wanted to give a sneak preview of my first project for Degrafa. One of the things we hope to provide in a future release is the ability to path-deform text, both along Bezier curves and in the more general case, a variety of splines. The algorithm requires an arc length parameterized curve, which includes the Singularity Beziers (quad and cubic), composite Bezier spline, and Catmull-Rom spline.
The following screen shot shows an example with a Catmull-Rom spline. The default method for initial and terminal points leads to a bit of ‘pinching’ at each end of the spline, so this is not an ideal spline for such an application. The algorithm works with any spline extending the Composite base class, so this happens to be one of the first test cases.
I’m temporarily drawing tangent and normal in order to verify the orientation. There are still a lot of details to be worked out, but I wanted to give everyone a preview of just some of the things I’ll be doing for Degrafa.
The Algorithmist 
Jim,
Great to have you aboard, this work is amazing and something we have all be clamoring for!
I can’t wait to see how far you take this.
– Tom
Amazing, perfect timing you have. I was looking at rendering text on curves myself yesterday. There’s a complete dearth of information about how to do it, and I’m surprised there aren’t libraries already out there. This is extremely useful work!
For us non-declaritive folks, will this kind of stuff be accessible through as3 code too?
Tom – should be, and I will make a simple demo available in advance so that you can package it up however you please.
regards,
– jim
Interesting – will there be a tutorial for this?
JT – haven’t planned a TechNote for this as spare time is currently very limited. I hope the online demo will be easy for people to deconstruct – I am planning on beefing up the documentation to help with the deconstruction.
thanks,
– jim
This makes my insides all twittery. Great work!