Lessons

Lesson Info

Character and Paragraph Panels

I'm going to open up a text file that I have heard That just has a bunch of placeholder text. I was kind of open. This was gonna be one of the new features In in design, you can fill in placeholder text. Sometimes you just need text to be in there, whether it's me demo ing it. Or sometimes you just want to have some text to fill up the place. So I just have a file that I just created. So I just found, you know, you cannot have too many alarm if some generators, right? This is hipster ism, Florham hipster or something. I don't know what is. But I thought it was pretty funny. So, you know, we've got things like VHS tapes, bicycles and vegan and all that stuff. So I just threw in some text. I just wanted some texture placeholder. There's some there, maybe not appropriate. But I think all these were okay. I kind of did a quick perusal of it. So all I did was going to grab that text and copy and pasted so that I have text when I need it. So when we create text in Sorry, Illustrator we need ...

to have it in a container of some kind. Everything else has been in a container, but there's two types of text containers in Illustrator, and there's point text and there's area text and they work a little differently. So area text. If you've been used to working in in design, this will look like that for used to just clicking your cursor and start typing. That's point text. That's what you've been doing in photo shop, if you've used that. So it kind of combines both of them and they have each have their own specific place. So what I had here was this long string of text, and if I see, I can see that it's in this rectangle frame. But what sets it apart from, say, a frame that we put graphics in is we have these little squares that are kind of bigger below the handles. That kind of just these little text flow basically says text flows into the upper left and it flows out in the lower right so we can string those together. We can have multiple threaded text frames, so that's what that is. It says. Okay, great. This is the frame that I want this text to take up. If I shorten up the frame, you'll notice that I suddenly have a little red plus in that lower right it got rid of the text, but it says, Hey, there's still more text to be had and I could do things like Click on that It's actually trying. Click on it exactly, and then I can click and drag with this What's called loaded cursor. It basically picked up the rest of the story, and now I am dragging it out and placing it in this frame, and I could see that these two frames are connected by this line. So as I move this around, it just says, Oh, those two are connected in some way. I could move this to another art board if I wanted to, but just it's just a different way to have two different setups for that text. And if you notice when I change the size of the frame, the text moves or re flows with it. And again, this is area text and how I can remember that as I drew out an area and put text inside of it. But There's also something called point text, and that's what our make over here to make point text. I just choose the type tool. And that's how I made a text frame to put text in a swell click and drag out. And then I can come over here and copy some text do Commander Control. See to copy that. Jump back over here to this frame, click in there and I have my cursor inside there and I'm gonna go ahead and sure I am. Reflect everything here really quickly, and I'm gonna drag this shape out again and I've got a flashing cursor appear. It's hard to see, but it's flashing, and I'm just gonna hit control or command V to face that in. So I have that same area text to that I had before. But I want point text where I could just have type sitting. It doesn't have toe. It isn't constrained by a frame. I'm not saying it needs to fit in this frame, and if I have too much, I'm going to get that little red plus or that over set text. I just want to click and start typing, so I'm just gonna click somewhere and either start typing or I could paste. But in this case, let's just say What have we been working with? We're working a lot of photography stuff, so I'm just going to type photography and you can't see that at all in its totally spelled wrong now. But I'm going to zoom in on that. Photographers, let's do that. They're they're ago, the end of the day. Sorry. So when I do that, I now have this extra frame. And before, when I pulled the frame on the area text and it kept re flowing, this is point text, and when I pull on this, I'm actually going to stretch that word out because I didn't create the frame that it sat in and said, This is how it needs to fit in here. I basically said, This is the text, and that frame is affecting the text itself instead of where it sits inside the frame. So why is that helpful? Well, if I hold on my shift key, I could just constrained those proportions, and it's bigger. I didn't need to make the frame bigger first and then make the text bigger to fit that the text always fits right in the frame because the frame was created on the fly with that text and where this has always been a problem in the past. Until, I believe, until the January 2014 update was that if somebody created something and created with point text and then I decided I wanted it to be in a frame, I'm trying to make the frame bigger and all I'm doing is distorting the text, so I would have to do is create a new frame and copy this text and paste that in there, and that's a pain. But what they added was this little thing off to the side, a little nubby thing off the side, and what I can do is I can double click on it, and it changes it from area from point text to area text. Now when I change this because I decided I needed to have more space for my words, I can just click in here and start typing, and it re flows around there. If it were point text, I can double click that. Bring that back to point text. Now you notice the frame snapped up to fit. But now if I change the size of this frame again, I'm changing the type itself and making it bigger. And so why is that important? Well, it just depends on the type of type you're going to use. If I'm doing a lot of prose, let's say we're gonna do 235 paragraphs of text. I'm gonna create area text cause I wanted to flow, But I'm making let's say a logo. And I just wanted to say, You know, let's do that Wild Photography is something that we one of my logos that was here. So let's actually make this bigger. I'm gonna go ahead and open up the character panel and make a bigger And in just a few minutes we're actually gonna be playing with that actual. The panel that's here, right? So we do that and say, Listen, this is wild photography, and the other thing is, is that you noticed that no matter what I type, it never refloat and kicked down because it's making the frame based on the type itself. So I have that and that's great. But the nice thing is, is if I want to change and add something to it is just gonna keep growing the frame. If I decided I needed to, he needed an L in his name here. If I needed to do that, it doesn't wrap around. I don't get that offset texted. So for me, if I'm doing like a logo or just one or two lines of text, I'm gonna put it in point text instead. And the thing to keep in mind is that when I create point text, I'm going over to the paragraph panel and tell it the alignment. I might want it aligned centered visit by liner to the left. It's automatically going to a fight if I haven't lined to left and I change it to centered. It's going to move inside the frame itself inside the line, And I don't Have you ever seen that when you've changed it? If somebody had, you know, is it moved it that way because I told that to set it up centered so it started from wherever I clicked, became the center of the text. So the great thing is, if I were setting something up, say, on a logo, let's say I had this image here and I know that I want my my type to be completely centered. I would just click here right in the center or right above it and hope for, you know, the smart guides if I could get it. If not, just gonna go ahead. And maybe I need to draw a guide. But I can do that and just click. And as soon as I start typing, you know it is automatically pushing it each direction. That's where that comes in handy. Otherwise I gotta make a frame and center it that I'm going to center of the frame is well. And then I got to make sure that the text isn't too big toe over set that frame. So for me, if I'm doing short bursts of text, I tend to use the point text. And if I'm doing more prose, more paragraphs, I would do area tax. That way. Let's actually play with the actual text that's in there. So those are the different types of type, as I like to call it, And let's see if I can delete my guide. I must have them locked. I do. Let's like that and delete that guide and I'm just gonna go ahead and grab some more of this text is, Well, just so have a paragraph to play with. So I have that as point text, and I have this as area text and zoom in on this When I'm working with character styling, so are just character. I'm assigning things like font and whatnot. I need to actually have the text selected. If I'm working with paragraph settings, I need to have my cursor inside the paragraph, but I don't have to have the whole paragraphs elected. So imagine a cheat. I'm gonna actually just hit a return, which I was tell people not to do. Don't do a hard return between paragraphs, but we're going to go right now just so we can actually see the difference that's here. And I'm gonna work with the character panel first. So I'm going to select some specific text here, right? So, to do that, then open up the character panel. I'm gonna pull that off so that it's just higher up when we can see it. And I'm work with a couple things to start with. I want to make sure that my show options were turned on because again, Adobe likes to hide things. I'm not sure why, but they do. So I would say show option. So I have all my text available to me. And this text if you've worked in other programmes, probably looks familiar. But a lot of people I don't understand what half this stuff, especially if you're coming from Photoshopped. You've been working very much of the visual world. Now you're starting battle this text and again you'll get that thing which we talk to, someone who works in in design. Everybody knows that it's the same. Well, not if you haven't been using it, you might not know it, so I'm gonna go over each of those things. So right now, the first thing and we're actually going to skip over type tool at the moment touch type tool. We're gonna talk about that in a while, so we start with here with the type of font. What font is this? So I'm going to click on this and I have my list of fonts that are available to me on this particular machine. So I have a whole bunch of them to choose from. Obviously there's the ones that are loaded. This is just right Shoes, my font. The great thing is I can either choose it from the pull down menu. Or if I know what it starts with, I can start typing it. So it's typed in Palatine. Oh, and everything that says Palatine Owen. It has shown up, and I congrats the individual typeface that's here, the individual. Wait. So I said, Great, that's bold, or I can choose it from this pull down menu. So with the fonts, you have a couple different options when I see Palatine. Oh, here I can drill down and see the individual ones here, and I can also choose it from the pull down menu down below. The other thing you notice when I was in the type. One of the options is add fonts from type kit. This is something that came in with Creative Cloud that I think the type Kate got introduced last year. So type kit we've been using for a long time for Web bonds. It's just an online repository of fonts. With your creative cloud subscription, you have access to all the type kit funds. That means if there's a font, you don't have that you want. You can say add funds from type kit. It's gonna go out to your creative cloud application, and it's going to go on to the adobe site and you're able to pick and choose and say anything that's on there you can use now there are some specific licensing things. Of course, with them. Certain things can't be outlined or packaged or things like that. So just read over the licensing that's there. But the great thing is, in a perfect world, everybody has creative cloud, Right? So I'm gonna make something here, and I'm going to use one of my type kit funds I'm gonna send it to Melissa is gonna work on it. But she also has creative cloud. Therefore, she has access to the same exact type kid fonts. I don't even have to worry about sending fonts to her. She's just got them. It might say you need to sync them up. Great. Just turn that on. The cool thing is, I can also run this filter here. That is just the little type kit icon. If I click on that, the only ones that show up in my men you are the type kit ones. This is handy because if I know that I am sending it off to somebody else, I'm not going to use a font that they don't have because again, because of licensing, everybody has to have those fonts. I can't really send Melissa Font that she doesn't have the right to use using the type kit one I know. She's on Creative Cloud. I know she has it, so she'll be able to sync it up. No problem. So if I stick to those, then I don't have to worry about any of that icky, sticky licensing stuff, right? So I know I'm good. So use the type kit funds from there. The next item here is the point size. So we're all pretty familiar, I think, with working with point sizes what they mean. You know, it's kind of a big mystery if you're not, if you haven't been in printing for a long time. But you know, we know what 14 point type looks like, and next to it is letting it's not leading. I know a lot of people have thought that it's letting so long involved story for that, but anyway, the leading is the amount of space between the lines. So if you're used to calling lines facing, that's what it is. Line spacing and you notice the's air in parentheses, and that just means that it set toe auto. So I come over here and I look and says It's set to auto. So basically, it's taking my 14 point type and giving me 16.8 points leading in between. And basically it's 120% of your font size. If I change this to 10 points, you'll notice my leading is exactly 12 points, so it's 100 20% of that. So it's nice to have it on auto. If you're getting started and you're not really familiar with type leaving on auto, it'll give you some nice letting. Now, of course, this type is different size in the rest, so it's not gonna look all that great over here. We have a turning and Kern ing is the amount of space between letter pairs, and so that's kind of what this little icon means kind of shows. Oh, like the V in the A should take up a certain amount of space. The V takes of this. Much of the eight takes up this much, but we kind of noticed and in designing their illustrators, smart enough for that. The whole type adobe type engine a smarter for go. Those two things. They're kind of angled together. Who pushed them together? They might look a little better because they just will look better a little closer together. And some letters look better. A little further part. So you don't get that weird. You know where you can't tell if it's an RN and RN em all together, right? Which is how my name ends up is Garnett a lot of the times because people don't realize it's an M and not in our end, bad turning. So what that does is just says between each letter pair and I would have to actually put my cursor between each letter pair and say how these two letters to be in the A in this case, how those two letters relate to each other so I can choose from the pull down menu. I could make it much tighter, so I would just move the being really close. It doesn't look very good, but that's what I did was make it really close. But what I generally do is keep the US the turning set toe optical, and what optical does is just kind of looks at each individual letter pair. If I run my cursor down, each will know, says says. It's negative two, and here it's negative six. And here it's 27 here it's negative 11. So it's just how each little pair of letters fits together. So by selecting all of it and choosing either optical or metrics on which was optical, in this case, it just says, looks at each one and makes its best guess how which we put together. Let's go back to this text here again. For everything else I have to have the text selected, and I'm only affecting the selected text you noticed when I change the font. The whole front didn't change. Just that little selection did. The other thing is tracking and tracking is the amount of space between the letters all the way across the board, so I might just make it really tight tracking or really loose tracking. And again, I'm not going to do this very often. But there may be times I mean, I might not do it in something like this. That's a huge chunk of prose. But if I had, let's say a a logo name and I just wanted to, you know, maybe it says, you know, Smith Real Estate and I wanted Smith to take up the same amount of space is real estate I would take and put a lot of tracking in Smith so that it takes up the same amount of space you know, in a logo that's gonna look fine. Smith tracked out like that looks fine. If you do that in the middle of a paragraph here, it's gonna look terrible, right? We're not going to do that. I always tell people, Just don't touch these the horizontal and vertical scaling just because you're really messing with the font. When you do just to kind of show you what it does, it just stretches it out. That's bad. We don't really want to do that. Ever. So one undo that same thing with the horizontal scaling as well. It's just really tweaking things out again. Might you do this in a logo? Might, you might. I might do that. Make it you know 104% with just to make it kind of why. But if I have a Serra font, it's going to start to look bad. But in San Serif Font, it might not look bad again if I'm trying to do something kind of decorative, you know, I'm not gonna do that again in my paragraphs. Baseline shift just takes certain items and shifts it right off the baseline, just like it says. So it's still sitting here on this line, and it's still being controlled by that same amount of letting the line spacing. But it's off the line, so it's super scripting room might sub scripted as well. Someone's gonna take that and put that back to zero. And the other thing we could do is we can also rotate our text around. Let's rotate that 90 degrees, so I've rotated each of the letters side with Now my going to the middle of a paradox also, probably not, but again, for a logo. I might want to be able to do that and switch it sideways or switch one or two letters that way just for an effect in some way, I can tell you I've used that exactly. Onley in training. I've never actually used that anything I've ever done. But again, there's always gonna be that person that goes, Oh, I love that this is what I use it for Great. I've used it that way in tables a couple times just when I've wanted tables to move around. The things that we can do is we can come up here and we can say it needs to be on all caps or in small caps. So just the first letter being capitalized, Aiken superscript it or Aiken subscript. It can also underline or strength through, so it's pretty, pretty self explanatory. The other stuff that you might want to keep aware of is that you have a language here that should be the language that you installed not only on your computer, but when you installed this version of illustrator you installed in this case, the English US a version of that what that controls is spell checking. So if I have done something that's in Spanish and English, let's say I can say this particular paragraph is in Spanish, right? So I can tell it. It's in Spanish. I love when people ask me if I click that Will it automatically turn to Spanish? See? It will all turn Spanish for you. It will be beautiful. No, it won't. I wish it would, but it won't. It's hardly even in English. This is in, you know, hip stories, remember? So hello. Hello, Safe selfies. I'm going to use that in everything from now on. HeLa cell fees. So any way you can tell it, it's in Spanish. So when it runs spell check. It knows to use the Spanish dictionary. Right? So if I've typed it in Spanish but I'm running an English dictionary on it doesn't really help me at all. So if I've got something typed in Spanish and I tell it, this paragraph is in Spanish when it runs spellcheck, it's going to use the Spanish Dictionary and only tell me when Spanish words are spelled wrong. All right, so you want to make sure that you have that set up If I ran spell check. Now, of course, it's gonna tell me pretty much everything is wrong because it's actually in English. So that's the character panel. These are things that we deal with on a character basis. whips. I just deleted everything that was there. All right, I'm coming down here to this next paragraph, and in this case, I'm just going to put my cursor inside the paragraph. I'm not going to actually select the entire paragraph. I'm just gonna put my cursor in the paragraph and things that I can deal with in the paragraph panel are things like my alignment. So says the line left, centered, right. And then these air, all the justified text, the last line to the left or centered or to the right are lined all the way across. So basically, it's a lot of icons to just do something like this. This is left justified. Smooth this down so we can see it. This is centered. This is right. Justified. This is when you use a lot, probably justified on right and left with left line all the way to the left. I could center that last line or have it to the right. Or even worse, I could have a go all the way across, and it doesn't necessarily won't necessarily always take just one word and take it across. It might pull from behind the line before it and try and bring it around. But still, it's gonna It's gonna look bad almost always. I don't think I've ever used that. But is this quite a bit and also left justified? So again, you just have to have your cursor sitting in there. We can also tell it that we wanted to have a light right or left margin so I can just click in here and say, I would like the margin to come in a little bit either on the right and or the left. So let's actually make this justified because it makes a lot more sense this way. So let's just bring that in. And the nice thing is that you can have it in one frame. You don't have to have a separate frame that's narrower, but maybe you have, like a pull out quote, and you wanted to be indented a little bit, so you just set the margins a little bit, and the nice thing you can do is you can come back to this thing, which is this next one is the first line indent. I've indented it 10 points. Well, I can have my text go the other way and go out by 10 points. Now it's interesting is that illustrator lets you go outside the text frame in design does not. So I'm not sure what the thinking is on that, but I like when it actually stops you at the frame. Otherwise, you suddenly run outside the frame. You don't realize it, but it's nice to be able to have the indent. The first line indent be the same as your amount of margin. And have this hanging punctuation could either be the first you know, the first line of text. Or you could do something like have a bullet and a tab or just a bullet and set up your tab so that your tab is that same distance. And so it looks like your bullets air hanging out over, although you can actually hang them out in Illustrator. So I'm actually going to delete all these and bring this back to zeros, and the other thing is, actually delete this here and leave my bullet there. You can actually put space before and after. So I said, Don't put this extra space in here. You don't want toe have actual hard returns extra harder turns between paragraphs because what happens is if it flows to the top of the page or new our board or something like that, or if you're in columns of text. If it's there, it's always gonna be there, even if it's the first thing on the paragraph or the column is that extra space? What you want is something that is there. When there's two paragraphs together, you want the space. But if there aren't two paragraphs together, get rid of the space and that's built into paragraphs in Illustrator So I can come in here and say, Let's delete this space So but I want some space between these two paragraphs and come down here to this last little businesses, space before or space after we can use those together. In this case, I would you space before there was going to give it some extra space. Now, when I look at this, I can see there isn't an actual hard return. But there's that space. If those two paragraphs come together, it'll add the space. If there aren't those two paragraphs together moves to the top of the next page. It forgets that space and the nice thing is, I can say that space is actually equivalent to whatever my letting is right. So I forget. What my letting Waas Let's go back and go into my type panel and open up my character panel and see that the leading is what is the leading here. It's kind of all mixed together. Let's just put auto on here, all right? And it's It doesn't even say what it is. We'll say it's 14 point, so we'll come back down here to my paragraph panel and I'll say it's 14 points. I just added, So it's basically equal toe one return Now The nice thing is, even if I was working in inches, I could come over here and say, Oh, the leading is 14 points I put in 14 PT and it puts it in there. So like a lot of times, the default is inches in that particular spot. All right, so I have that extra return, and you could again do space afterwards as well if you wanted to. And keep in mind if you have space before in space afterwards. Those two values we're gonna add together between each paragraph seven cents, OK, so That's the character Starling and the pair of paradox styling this Well, I'm going to reset my workspace. So Eric comes back here and everything back where I expected to be hopes, including my CSS properties. Oh, I changed it to Demo one. We don't do that. Let's reset that. There we go. All right, so those are some basics of what's in the character panel and what's in the paragraph panel. So again, if you're working with character styling, you have to select the text. If you're working with paragraph styling, you just have to have your cursor in the paragraph, right, Erica? A couple questions from in Yeah, from the folks at home into Go and Sunny Day. Can you one more time show us How do you change Point text to area tax point text area. Text them back is I just select the frame and there's this little ah little circle that's sitting off to the side. Just double click on it when I do that. Now you notice there's that extra square that tells me there's some outgoing text. If I drag this down, I can see that there. If I double click, it snaps it back up into place. So and that's on Lee. I think that was the January 2014 update that did that. So it's pretty new if you've got an older version, great and from Nathan when rotating a text box, Is there a way to make the text rotate with it without converting it to outlines to rotate a text? I could just take the text box and rotate it, if that's what they mean. I just take that text from that's here and go up under the rotate tool and double click on it and I can rotate it. Rotate it 90 degrees like that, and our text is rotated with it. So it's actually just sitting in the text or in the frame like them. Can you from sunny Day? Can you show us again how you typed a bullet type of bullet? Sure, absolutely. It's just option or all. Let's get my cursor on their option or all eight is a bullet