How to Bend Text Along a Path in Lightburn

In this tutorial I am going to show you how to bend text along a path using Lightburn software. This is a great feature when you are designing signs either on wood or on your cardstock projects.

Lightburn makes it so easy to achieve this effect.

Watch the video below or scroll down for written instructions.

The first thing we are going to do is select the Draw Tool and I’m going to click once on the screen with my mouse

When I do this I get this line that follows the mouse around wherever I click on the workspace.

I’m just going draw a line and click again but this time I’m going to hold my mouse down as I click and now when I move the mouse around it creates a curve.

So let’s create a curve, something like this

Then I let go of the mouse and now what happens when I move the mouse it creates another part of the curve.

So just move it up to where you like and then click just once with the mouse and you can see the curve is formed.

But hang on a minute, the line is still following me around at this point! So I just need to press the Escape key to stop it from doing that.

Now that we have a nice curve, I’m going to click on the Select Key,
and I’m going to click on the line and change it to a color that’s a little bit more obvious to see, as it’s a bit hard to see it at the moment.

So there we go so we’ve got our curve done and now what we want to do is just type in our text.

So I’m going to click on the Text Tool, then click on the screen
and I’m going to type in my text.

Okay so I’ve written my text.

Now what I’m going to do next is give it a color.

So I’m going to go down to the colour selections table and select a color different to the one I selected for the line.

Now what this does is put the line on one layer. So the first layer is the curved line.
And the text is now on another layer. So the text is now on the second layer.

Now with the Select Key selected I highlight everything.

Now I right click and select the option Apply Path to Text

Once I click on that option, you can see how the text is now sitting along that curve

It’s cut off some of the text so I need to make that text a little smaller.
So just click away to somewhere else on the screen and then click back onto the text. This gives me the option to reduce the sizing and now my text fits along that path
You will also notice that there is a line running through the center of the text. If you want to have that line there, that’s fine.

However, if you don’t want that line to output to your laser
all you need to do is come over to the layers, and where the line is you can select the option to disable it.

Now the line won’t be sent to your laser, so it won’t cut or draw the line.

You can also stop the line from showing on the screen completely by clicking the Show option. Once you turn that off the Line is now gone so all you’re left with on the screen is the curved text.

Now there are also some other options available to you.

Select the Alignment of the Text – Above or Below the Line

If you want the line to appear above or below the text

• Select the text and you have the following options available in the Align field
  • Top
  • Middle
  • Bottom
• We currently have our Align Y option set to middle
• If I click on the little up and down arrows I can select bottom and the line now appears on the bottom of the text

If I select the Top option, the line now appears on the top of the text.

Spacing the Text

There is another option here that you can also select for the spacing of the text.

When you can select that option, you can see how it changes the width between the letters.

So you just can change it to suit how you want the text to look.

And that is how easy it is to bend text along a line.