I still have not gotten a good answer for this one...

ok, I want to use vector fonts so I can scale up and skew, etc. and not lose quality and I also want some "canned" code that will take a word and manipulate it in a certain fashion. for example, if I had the user enter "LIONS", some function would take each character and reformat the word to look arched or rainbow or bridged or some other formats.

so "LIONS" would become:

LIONS

you get the idea...is there a component or some canned code that can provide that functionality? basically I want Photoshop or Illustrator functionality (the way you would put text in different arrangements) but I need it done dynamically. Lastly, if this doesn't exist in AS3, why doesn't someone create a component that would do that, the code exists somewhere...they probably could make a ton of money because I haven't been able to find it on the web and I know others are looking for that functionality. I would pay money for it because I don't have the time to spend developing it. Let me know your thoughts!

You want something that will randomly rearrange user entry and then change it's color? Is that about right?

well, I'm not sure what you mean by "randomly", I want them to be able to choose "Rainbow style" and then it takes "LIONS" and puts it in a rainbow configuration (there would be other configs also, Bridge, pennant, etc.), and also to be able to change color of font (not a big deal) and be able to increase/decrease size, rotate, and that's it for the most part.

like Illustrator or photoshop really, only dynamically

Do they need to remain text, or can it be merely images of text?

images would be fine, I would just have to have them "redo" it if they wanted to change the text I guess, and by that I mean re-enter different text, hit "submit" or something. it would have to preserve shape for any font that the user could choose from though...so it would have to roughly appear as the same font, if you know what I mean. ideas?

Yeah, you can create your text with whatever font you like, colors, etc. Then draw that into a bitmap, then apply a displacementMapFilter or other bitmap operation to achieve the desired shape and rotation.

do you know of any good examples with good precision doing this? I considered this awhile back but dismissed it after I saw some of my results...can you point me in the right direction or show me a good example of how to achieve the effect like as in the above "LIONS" example? thanks!

No, I don't have any examples in mind. I did see a while back a displacementMap maker which let you drag things around and then returned a map you could use to replicate the transform, but I don't have that link.

It would certainly be non-trivial to calculate the appropriate distortions, and if you've already given it a shot then maybe this is a dead end.

like you said, it's non-trivial and I didn't spend a world of time on it and I was starting to like the idea but then the results I produced looked blurred and not good quality so it didn't seem like a good option, but like I said, I didn't spend much time on it. you probably could get the desired effect...anybody want to try this one out? I guess I just don't understand displacement maps good enough to do what I want and don't have the time to just experiment. this could be worth someone's wild though if they were successful at achieving the effect. anybody?

Short answer: there's no quick-fix component that gives you word-art.

The displacementMapFilter relies on discrete pixel data to render the distortion so you'll never get clean results out of it for something as sharp as text-rendering. On top of that, displacement mapping is very hard to control with precision (you can't just say "bend the text up in the middle, by 30px")...it's a lot of guess and check.

As I've already stated a couple times in similar threads - you need to research envelope distortion and apply it to the CV points on each glyph in your text.

thanks for the reply...I guess the question remains, why isn't there a component/plugin/canned code to do this? we've put people on the moon and in to outer space, but we can't come up with a simple solution to this issue? I find that hard to believe...again, I'd be willing to pay someone to do this work (don't think this is the thread, but oh well), not sure what the price would be. I'm a developer but I simply do not have the time to undertake this and have no experience with envelope distortions, CV points, character-by-character transformations or otherwise. Anyone up for the challenge? Like I said, I'm not the only one looking for this functionality. your thoughts?