I’m sure there is an easy way to do this but I’m not finding it.
This is part of an SVG that I opened in Lightburn. The objects that appear to be text are not, they are actually vector shapes.
I need to arrange the shapes along the inside of the circle. The circle in this case is a toolpath and represents the inside of a precut wood circle.
Thanks for any help.
Thanks for the offer Ralph. I was able to fix it manually but was hoping there would be a software function as doing it by man is a bit tedious.
As @RalphU suggests, this would not be difficult to reproduce the text within LightBurn and curve in one of the ways LightBurn provides. Fonts and Text - LightBurn Software Documentation
In this case the font wasn’t terribly unusual but what if it wasn’t text? Then even if you recreated the objects the only way to align them to a path or object would be manually which becomes very tedious.
@Rick Any possibly of a way in the future to do the object alignment to path or is this something that will always need to be done in AI, Inkscape, etc and then brought into Lightburn?
Thanks for any insights, suggestions, ideas.
You can add it under “suggestions / wishes”, right next to the magnifying glass, top right, but I think such a wish already exists. If it exists, you should support this suggestion.
LightBurn does provide a ‘Copy along Path’ to allow you to align to a path, but that copies the original shape some number of times. The hard part is these shapes are random, may have multiple parts to make an object, and know nothing of each other, but we want the result to be readable as something our eye/brain sees as text. Not easy to address in a clean way once Text is turned into just paths. 
How do you accomplish this in these external tools?
Two-point rotate could be used to make this a bit faster, but we don’t have an easy way to align a series of arbitrary shapes to a path.
I’m not an expert in either program but I’ll play with them a bit and get you some screenshots.
Thanks for the help so far and for at least taking an interest. I was a developer for 37 years so can feel your “guys” pain.
@Rick Here is a bit older video but does show aligning a series of object around a path. In this case he is careful to point out that the centers of the objects/circles are aligned and it will be interesting to see if the objects not being aligned affect the outcome. Also I realize these objects are circles so there isn’t a top or side that might need to be rotated like with my original letter objects or even any non-circular object so this example leaves a lot out.
Here’s the link Align objects evenly around path using Illustrator - YouTube
Thanks @RalphU. Unfortunately the example in the video I linked to is a poor example of what we are discussing, which is how in Illustrator you can align multiple objects along a path. A better example would have used multiple non-circular shapes like squares, triangles, stars, ovals, etc.
The take-away that Rick and I are discussing is what are the steps required in Illustrator or Inkscape to align multiple discrete objects to a path.
If you look at the first post you’ll see that I have a svg that i purchased that has some text that has been converted to object, so that while it looks like text it really no longer is so you can’t manipulate the letters the way you can text. In this case the letters could just as well be any vector object of any shape.
You’ll see in that post that the letters don’t match the curve/arc of the pre-cut sign board that I want the letters to line up with so we’ve been discussing what steps these other programs use to make this work…
@RalphU What you described is pretty much how I did it for this example. Since this example is letters, if there had been a lot more text and since the font is pretty generic I could have simply deleted these letters and recreated the whole thing as a text string and used the built-in text bending or text on a path features.
This was just an example though. What my ultimate goal is, is to develop a aztec style “calendar” which has many hundreds of objects arranged in concentric circles, I’m sure you’ve seen some of them, and hand arranging, manipulating and placing each one by hand would be very tedious and time consuming.
It is possible to do this in Illustrator using the blend tool but I was hoping to not have to get that deep into Illustrator since Lightburn is much more user friendly and has become quite an advanced vector design tool.
Thanks again for such detailed information and all the time you took testing and documenting this. At the very least you have developed a resource that others with a similar situation to the original post can use.
Thanks again.
Just a thought… I guess you could create your own symbol font where each character represents one of your graphic objects. You could then use the text manipulation tools (Apply Path To Text etc.). I seem to remember being able to do this in CorelDraw, I expect you can do it in Illustrator too and it looks as though you can do it in Inkscape. There appear to be some free font editors that you could use as well.
Thank you all for this feedback. Thought-provoking. This has furthered our internal discussions about how best to provide such options. Thank you. Further investigation required. 
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