Am 01.05.2020 um 10:26 schrieb Gerben Wierda <gerben.wierda@rna.nl>:

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,

Can’t you duplicate and shift the path, i.e. keep the original visible and make the copy that carries the text invisible? That’s what I would do in a graphical application, but I would be surprised if MP wouldn’t know a transformation for this purpose.

No, that is what I did in the example, fiddling, but there is no transformation that will work in all cases. E.g. on the left side of the bump, I need to go to the upper left, on the right side to the upper right. There is no single shift that helps me. Nor a scale rotation or shift combination. That could be managed by only going up (though the distance to the path would vary, on the sides the text would be very close or on the top it would be too far.)

There is an example, at the link below, of creating a parallel path that claims to cope with sharp bends in the original path. You might be able to adapt it?
<https://therion.speleo.sk/wiki/metapost#shuttering_two_parallel_lines>