Techniques described herein take character glyphs as input and generate a text-on-a-path text object that includes the character glyphs arranged in a determined order along a path. For instance, a method described herein includes accessing character glyphs in input data. The method further includes determining an order for the character glyphs based on relative positions and orientations of the character glyphs in the input data. The method further includes generating a path for the character glyphs, based on the order, and associating the path with the character glyphs. Further, the method includes generating a text object that includes the set of character glyphs arranged in the order along the path.