I've been editing a logo that I had designed for me that didn't quite meet my goals. I couldn't afford to keep paying the artist for revisions as he didn't seem to understand vectors much beyond some basic functions for turning his other art into vectors and leaving all kinds of artifacts and unnecessary nodes. Now that I've smoothed most of the things I took issue with, I am stuck with text that has already been converted to a path that no longer smoothly follows the outside of the circle.

I've watched several tutorials for pattern on path, but they all use a single object or path and repeat it and I'm trying to take what is now several different objects/paths and spread them out along the edge of the circle as seen below. My issue now is that they are too close on one side, and they no longer reference the circle to determine orientation or distance to the edge of the circle.

I'd like to keep Sweet and Oasis at their approximate locations, but rearrange them and the dot in the middle to wrap to the circle below.

It's not that bad... The text could use a nudge or two, but my addition of a reference circle tells me it's only needs to go a few pixels to the right and maybe a couple down.

After it's centered, if the text needs to hug the purple object tighter, I'd scale it down a half percent.

I appreciate the suggestion Tyler , but I need to eventually blow this up to 4'x4' and manually adjusting the letters to be "good enough" won't suffice for putting this on the side of my business.

Meh.  If it looks good, it is good. That's why there's techniques like kerning.

If customers are flyspecking your signage at that level, your business is already in trouble.

No, I'm the customer and there was issues with his piece from top to bottom. I'd already paid over $800 for what should have been a complete project, but he wasted the last several days and my allowed revisions working on what was supposed to be a vector landscape that he spent the majority of the time trying to sell me on the idea of adobe AI instead of what I'd asked for. The short is, as inexperienced as I am, I knew I wasn't happy but the contract had me bound and I wasn't about to pay another 400 for him to fix it.

So I've been revising my high school experience with Illustrator and I've fixed almost everything I was bothered by. This was just the last step before I add back in the fills and redo the layers so that there aren't any spots missing color like before. I'm just hoping for an answer that won't involve spending more money just to buy a font.

First thing I'd do is raise the lightness of the page to see the objects and grid more easily. (Document Properties)

If I wanted to tighten up the small variations in radial distance, I'd get the letters to align to the "known-good" reference circle, then group with the circle and move to center with the purple. Then hide the reference circle.

Keeping in mind, that the letters don't appear to be the same height. e.g. The I looks significantly shorter than the S.

So, in the end, it is a judgement call and you're the judge. Good enough is good enough, when it's good enough for you.

BTW, two Inkscape features you may find helpful, if you want to avoid buying the font:

1. Extensions>Generate from Path>Distribute along path (formerly known as the scatter extension).
2. Fonts can be made in Inkscape. (may be dated info).

What's the name of the typeface?

Maybe a polar alignment tool would be helpful. This one was made using the interpolate extension set for 10 steps. 

Right-click the thumbnail to download the svg. 

I appreciate all the help Tyler. The name of the font is Chennai. I found a free copy that I couldn't make bold in Inkscape, now I've found a free copy of the bold version. The interpolate extension looks like it might help a lot to just manually adjust them. Thanks for all the advice, hopefully I can get this wrapped up this weekend so I can get the signing finally ordered.

Here's a method to align text around a circle.