I've just uploaded a new beta build of Acorn (v5.3b) which includes a feature that has been requested many times over the years: laying out text in a circle.

With this new feature, I can finally reproduce Flying Meat's logo in Acorn. It always irked me whenever someone would write in asking how to do this, as there is text in a circle in our logo, so it must be possible. But FM's logo was made over a decade ago in Illustrator, years before work on Acorn was started.

Most text features you'd expect work with it. Right, left, and center alignment, and you can rotate the text beyond that as well. Kerning works as expected and Acorn even supports ligatures and gets the selections right with it.

As a first go at this feature, it's pretty good. There are still things to clean up and add to it, but overall I'm fairly happy with it.

And before everyone asks, yes, this is a prelude to text on a curve. That feature won't be making it into Acorn 5.3, but this is a nice step towards it some day. No promises of course.

Want to play with it? Head on over to the latest builds page and grab a copy of the beta.