Text on a Circle
Put text on a circle in any font: the line repeats round the ring with even spacing and turns slowly. Save a PNG for a badge, or a looping GIF or MP4.
What is circular text?
Circular text puts the letters along a ring in place of a straight baseline, with each one turned to stand on the curve. It's an old layout. Seals have carried a legend round the edge of the emblem for a long time, and coins, stamps and badges use the same ring of text.
Here every letter is placed by its angle and its distance from the center, polar coordinates basically, and then rotated so its top points outward. It reads clockwise from the top of the circle. 3D Text Generator does something different: it sets a line round a drum seen from the side, so the letters swing toward you and don't circle a center.
How to put text on a circle
Start on the blank canvas, or load an image or video you want to ring with text. Type your line in Text. The On a path motion is already set, with Size at 0.08.
Amount sets the circle. Its radius goes from 0.18 to 0.38 of the frame's shorter side, and Position X and Y move the center around. Size, Font, Weight and Colour handle the letters, and the button next to the Font list adds a .ttf or .otf file of your own.
Speed spins the ring. At 1 it does a full turn every ten seconds; at 0 it stays put, which is what you want for a round logo or a badge.
Settings for a round badge, a one-copy seal and a slow spinner
Round badge: Speed 0, Amount 0.5, Size 0.06, with a mark between the words, like FRESH • LOCAL • DAILY •. That puts the ring at 0.28 of the shorter side and leaves the middle open for a logo loaded as the picture.
One-copy seal: push Size up, or bring Amount down, until only one copy of the phrase fits. The count gets rounded to a whole number and the spacing stretched to close the ring, so once it's down to one, that single copy spreads out evenly to meet itself.
Slow spinner: Speed 0.5 gives one turn every 20 seconds, which is slow enough to read as it goes round.
Why does the text repeat round the circle?
The line gets repeated as many times as it fits round the ring, with a 0.6 text-height gap after each copy. Then the spacing is stretched or pulled in a touch so the copies meet without a seam. A short word makes for a busy ring. Use a longer phrase or a bigger Size and you'll get fewer repeats.
Repeats shorten the loop, too. With three copies the ring looks the same after a third of a turn, so at Speed 1 a recording of about 3.3 seconds loops just as cleanly as a full ten-second turn.
Saving circular text
Save a PNG for a badge or for print. Small letters on a curve have fine, angled edges, and JPG puts a fringe of noise round them.
For a turning ring on a web page, record a single repeat as a GIF so the file stays short. A long, slow turn behind a video works better as MP4.