The message, and what is behind it
*"Curve karke bhejo."* *"Please convert text to curves."* *"Outline the fonts."* Every print shop sends this, and most designers do it without knowing why, which means they also do it in the places where it is a mistake.
Here is the mechanism. Text in a design file is not a picture of letters. It is a string of characters plus a reference to a font: *set this in Poppins SemiBold*. The shapes live in the font file on your computer. Open that design on the shop's machine, which does not have Poppins, and the application substitutes something else. The letters change width. The line breaks move. A headline that fitted on two lines becomes three, a logo gets wider than its box, and nobody notices until 2,000 copies are printed.
Converting text to curves replaces the reference with actual geometry. The letters become paths. There is no font to be missing.
- CorelDRAW: Ctrl+Q, Convert to Curves
- Illustrator: Shift+Ctrl+O, Type > Create Outlines
- Inkscape: Shift+Ctrl+C, Path > Object to Path
- Affinity Designer: Layer > Convert to Curves
The cost, which nobody mentions
Once outlined, the text is not text. No spellcheck, no search, no editing, no restyling. A client asking to change a phone number means redrawing it.
So the working rule is: keep an editable master, and export an outlined copy. Name them so a tired person at 11pm cannot confuse them:
poster-diwali-v3-EDITABLE.cdr
poster-diwali-v3-OUTLINED.cdr
poster-diwali-v3-PRESS.pdfWhen outlining is the wrong answer
Outlining a 64-page book is a bad idea, and it is a mistake people make trying to be careful. Each glyph becomes a path of maybe 30 to 90 nodes. A page of body text goes from a few hundred font references to tens of thousands of curves. The file balloons, the RIP crawls, and jobs time out on older equipment.
For body text, embed the fonts instead. A PDF export embeds a subset of each font — only the glyphs used — and the press sees exactly your typeface with none of the node explosion. Every PDF/X preset does this by default. There is a permission bit inside font files controlling whether embedding is allowed; nearly all commercial and open fonts permit it, but a small number do not, and your export dialog will complain if you hit one.
Outline for logos, headlines, short display text, and anything going to a cutting machine. Embed for everything else.
Fonts you can legally use, free
Body text in a paid job with a pirated font is a real risk, and "I downloaded it from a free fonts site" is not a defence. Many aggregator sites host cracked cuts of commercial faces.
Safe sources: Google Fonts (almost all under the SIL Open Font Licence — free for commercial use, embeddable, and you can sell what you make), Fontshare from the Indian Type Foundry, Ek Type for open Devanagari and Gujarati, The League of Moveable Type, and Adobe's own open-source releases like Source Serif. Read the licence file that ships with the font once; it takes two minutes.
For Indic and other complex scripts, test the actual words before committing. Correct rendering of conjuncts depends on OpenType shaping tables and on the application's text engine, and support varies across Inkscape, Illustrator and CorelDRAW versions. Type your client's real name in the real font at the real size, then look at it. Do not test with Latin placeholder text.
Kerning, tracking, and where they show
Tracking is uniform space applied across a range of characters. Kerning is the space between one specific pair. They are different jobs.
Bad kerning is invisible in body text and glaring in a headline or a logo, because the flaw scales with the type. The pairs that break most often are the ones where a diagonal or an open shape meets something else: AV, To, Ya, LT, P. followed by a full stop, and any capital next to a quotation mark.
Most fonts ship a kerning table the designer wrote — that is metrics kerning. Some applications also offer optical kerning, which ignores the table and spaces by looking at the shapes. For a well-made text face, metrics is better. For a cheap or free display face with a thin kerning table, optical is usually better. Illustrator and InDesign expose the choice in the Character panel.
Adjusting a single pair by hand:
- Illustrator and InDesign: click between the two letters, then Alt+Left/Right
- Inkscape: place the text cursor between them, Alt+Left/Right
- CorelDRAW: Shape tool (F10) on the text, select the character node, and drag — or use the interactive spacing arrows at the corners of the text block
Never use a "faux bold" or "faux italic" button. It thickens or slants the outline mechanically, which fattens curves unevenly and slants the counters wrongly. Use the real weight the family ships.
Type on a path
Illustrator has a Type on a Path tool. Inkscape: select text and a path, then Text > Put on Path. CorelDRAW: hover the Text tool over a curve until the cursor changes, or Text > Fit Text to Path.
The honest problem: on a tight circle, letters splay apart at the top and jam together at the bottom of an inner curve, because the spacing is measured along the baseline while the letter bodies sit outside or inside it. The fix is a larger radius, more tracking, and baseline shift to move the text off the path — not scaling the letters, which changes their weight. For a circular badge, set the bottom text on a second, separate circle drawn in the opposite direction so it reads left to right rather than upside down.
Before you send
Open the outlined copy on a machine that does not have your fonts. If it looks identical, you are done. That test takes thirty seconds and catches the failure this whole lesson is about.
Before you move on