Hack to make sure text around a circle is centered

Today I want to share a quick tip with you about getting text in the right spot when you wrap it around a circle or arc. (If you don’t know how to do that, see this post). It’s not hard to do, but one thing that I used to struggle with was making sure my words came down the same amount on each side of the circle.

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Hard to picture? Here’s an example. Look at this text around a circle. The words are lower on the left than the right.

Now, obviously I’ve exaggerated that. But how do you figure out where to put it? Some people have the superpower of eyeballing it. I do not, so I created some tricks to help. It’s not magic — just logic.

Trick #1: Centering to the page

The first trick is something you want to do before you even pull the words toward the circle. You center the circle side to side on the page.

First, select your circle. Open the Alignment icon in the Quick Access Toolbar. It’s the one that looks like a bar graph. Select the middle one on the top row.

If just one shape or one set of grouped shapes is selected, this puts the shape/set of shapes in the middle of the page side to side. This will help a great deal as you do the next tricks. (And yes, you can use all those alignment options for putting things in specific spots on your page).

Go ahead and pull your words to wrap around your circle now.

Trick #2: Use a horizontal reference

Now that you’ve got the circle centered to the page, you’re going to create a horizontal reference. You can do this by turning on your grid, revealing your cutting mat, or, if you have Designer Edition and up, using a guideline. I’m going to use that last one. If you are as well, make sure to turn off the “Snap to Guides” in the grid setup of the Page Setup Panel.

See how you can already spot that the words are lower on the left? Use the control point to move the text around the circle until the sides are more even. Look for the first and last letters of your phrase. You want them relatively the same distance from your horizontal guide.

You could stop there, but it’s not yet exact. Here’s the reason why. Some letters, like an “r” don’t have anything at their lower outside, whereas something like an “m” does.

Or for my original words, the lower left of the “w” is not at the outside, and the “e” is curved which means it isn’t either. That makes it hard to figure out where each end should be. So we need 1 more trick to make it perfect.

Trick #3: Use a vertical reference

Here’s where centering the circle on the page side to side is going to help. Use a vertical reference that’s right at the center of your page. For me, I pulled another guideline to the 6″ mark, since my page is 12″ wide. Notice that when I select the guideline, the software tells me its location.

You can just as easily use the grid.

Now select the circle, and you’ll see that the small white box on the top side of the bounding box (the one you use to squash the height without adjusting the width) is along your vertical guide.

You’re going to select your text box now, and make sure the white box on the top side of the text box is also along that vertical guide. Mine’s just a bit off.

To adjust, get back into text edit mode and scootch the words around the circle a bit more. You’ll have to go back and forth between selection mode and text edit mode, but keep working until that white square is in the right spot. How fussy you want to be with this is completely up to you.

Now my words are centered side to side around the circle.

That’s all there is to it!