The Book of Inkscape

20.7 Text

Now, let’s add a textual banner to our animation—just a single word, “dance!”. Can we do something more interesting than copying the same static text object into each frame?

Once again, we could use the Calligraphic pen to draw ruffled handwritten letters over some text object used as a guide, so that the entire animation is in a common style. However, for the purpose of demonstration, let’s try another approach: Make the text banner smoothly billowing as if on a flag. To distort the text, you can use the Envelope Deformation path effect (13.1.8 Envelope Deformation); however, it is probably faster to apply some node sculpting instead (12.5.7.2 Node Sculpting).

Create a text object using a nice-looking font, convert it to path (), ungroup ...