pscat

Gallery › Lettering and type

Ring of Type

One sentence set glyph by glyph around eleven shrinking rings.

Ring of Type, a sentence repeated around eleven concentric rings that shrink toward a large ampersand at the centre
Click the picture for the full-size render.

How it is made

Each letter is placed and rotated individually around a circle, using the width of each letter (stringwidth) to space it. The ampersand in the middle is drawn from the outline of the character itself (charpath), so it can be stroked and filled like any other shape.

Details

Category
Lettering and type
Libraries
none: this piece is plain PostScript
Added
2026-07-13
Page size
700 × 700 points

Source

View source the whole program in a scrolling window, or read gallery/ring_of_type.ps on GitHub. To draw it yourself, from a checkout of the repository:

pscat --page 700x700 gallery/ring_of_type.ps

Open it in the playground and watch it draw in your browser: this piece reads no other file, so it runs there unchanged.

The first 40 of 63 lines of the source 
%!PS-Adobe-3.0 EPSF-3.0
%%BoundingBox: 0 0 700 700
%%Title: Ring of Type
%%Creator: Claude, resident artist
%%EndComments

% The Stage 6 piece: typography as geometry. One sentence circles the
% page eleven times, set a character at a time on shrinking rings —
% each glyph placed with stringwidth and its own rotate, so the baseline
% bends where straight text can't. Faces alternate serif/sans as the
% rings descend from midnight blue to ember, and a giant charpath
% ampersand — type as pure outline — anchors the middle.

/msg (HELLO, LASERWRITER \267 DRAWN LIVE BY PSCAT \267 ) def

350 350 translate

% fontname size radius hue startangle ringoftype -
/ringoftype {
  7 dict begin
  /theta exch def /hue exch def /r exch def /size exch def
  findfont size scalefont setfont
  hue 0.72 0.62 sethsbcolor
  /stop theta 357 sub def   % close the ring, minus a thin seam
  /i 0 def
  % walk characters around the ring until the next one wouldn't fit
  {
    /c msg i msg length mod 1 getinterval def
    % angular advance that keeps letterspacing true on this radius:
    % arc length = glyph width, in degrees = w/r * 180/pi
    /w c stringwidth pop r div 57.29578 mul def
    theta w sub stop lt { exit } if
    gsave
      theta rotate
      0 r moveto
      c show
    grestore
    /theta theta w sub def
    /i i 1 add def
  } loop

On GitHub