[MiNT]

Create->shapes->line

click points, right click to finish your spline. The vertex editing works mostly how you'd expect with the transform tools. Also you can select vertices, and convert them to different tangency types - bezier, bezier corner, smooth, corner - by right clicking in the viewport and selecting the type from the quad menu. I would go with bezier for this, since you can rotate and scale the tangency, and it has more control than 'smooth'.

Also you can animate the spline vertices, so you could just animate your spline vertices and set the spline to renderable. If you need more detail (ex,tapers,etc) on your text, then you can take a long, highly segmented box, do whatever you want to it, then use the pathdeform modifier on it with the animated spline.