I have been looking at lmt_followtext and followtext to get typesetting done along a path. That works fine, except that in my case, I need the text to not be exactly on that path, I need it to hover slightly above tor below he path. Given that the path may have an unpredictable form, that means that all the glyphs need to be shifted a bit, there is no generic transfrom of the entire text string that will work,