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Illustrator can be used to accomplish many different design tasks. For this reason, Illustrator CS4 Essential Training teaches core concepts and techniques that can be applied to any workflow for print, the web, or assets that will find their way into other applications. Mordy Golding explains the elements that make up vector graphics—paths, strokes, and fills—and shows how to use each of Illustrator's drawing tools. He demonstrates how to combine and clean up paths, and organize them into groups and layers. Mordy also covers text editing, working with color, expressive brush drawing, effects, and much more. Exercise files accompany the course.
Illustrator, there is more than just graphics; it does text too. In fact, sometimes text can be the most important part of the design you are working on. When it comes to creating and managing text in Illustrator, there are two important concepts or two different types of text that you could work with. There is something called point text and then there is something called area text and we will deal with those two separately. For this movie, we are going to focus on using point text. Now I have this file open. It's called basic_text. You will find in Chapter 06 of your exercise files. Well, I have actually used this file for the remaining chapter. I'll go over to my Tool panel and I'll choose here the Type tool.
The way that you create point text in Illustrator is you simply click and then release the mouse right away. Don't click and drag or anything else for that matter and you will see a blinking cursor on the screen. Now if you are coming from an application like InDesign, for example, or QuarkXPress, you may be familiar with the concepts of creating a frame. You click and drag out to create a frame and your text is inside of a frame. Well, here my point text is not bound by anything. In reality, Illustrator does have the concept of a frame that's what we will talk about in the next movie when we learn about area text. But point text is not bound by anything except for the single point that you just created now wherever you clicked and I'll show you where that exists as well.
But for now, I just simply have this blinking cursor that I can put anywhere on my page. I'm going to start typing. Let's say I type in, let's say in all caps here, SAFETY RULES. Let's say, we do that, some surfing safety rules. So now I have this text, let's talk about some basic settings over here just to make a little bit more apparent and working with it. If I go ahead and I press Ctrl+A or Command+A, it will select all my text that I have right there. Alternatively, I can just use my regular Arrow tool here and click on it to select it. I'm going to do a few things. First of all, I'm going to go to the View menu and I'm going to basically Hide Bounding Box, because I want you to focus on exactly what's happening here with text and that way we become readily apparent in a moment.
I'm also going to change the point size, let's make this x a bit bigger so we could see it maybe around 60 points. So there we go, now it says SAFETY RULES nice and clear. Let's take a look over here. I have this underline that appears underneath the words. SAFETY RULES and then on the far left I have this anchor points. Everything always comes down to these anchor points in Illustrator. Well, that anchor point is what defines this text and that's really why this is called point text, is because that anchor point is where that text basically emanates from. It's important to realize that because should I decide that I want to align that text differently again that point is going to be the main -- yes, you can say point of contact with that text. For example, right now, if I look at my paragraph setting here in my Control panel, I see that my text is aligned left.
If I were to choose align center, watch what happens. The point where -- the anchor point where I created the text remains stationary but the text becomes centered on that point and if I align my text to the right, then you will see that again the point remains stationary but the text now aligns itself to the right and basically that's why I have the alignment set that way. Lets go back to align left for a minute here and that's just the important thing about understanding what point text is, because there is no frame or there is nothing that encompasses this particular text. The text goes on forever. So, for example, if I just type in SAFETY RULES FOR A WONDERFUL, and notice that as I'm typing my text just keeps going, it doesn't wrap at the end of the page. It keeps going on and on that's because there is no balance for this particular object, it will keep going until I type a return.
For example, if I hit the Return key or the Enter key on my keyboard, I then get a second line. SUMMERTIME FUN, I'm not making any sense with what I'm typing over here. But basically I can go ahead and just add as many lines as I want to. We will talk more about the settings for these in a moment, but that's how you create point text inside of Illustrator. I'll tell you. Let me actually delete this here, so we can go back to SAFETY RULES here. Usually in Illustrator, the type of text that you will create most often will be point text. If you are creating like a diagram and you wan to have a little caption or a little bit of a call out. You probably use point text for that, it's easy to align them.
For example, I know that my text is right now aligned to the left; I can grab that anchor point and snap it to anything else. If I want it to center, I can do it that way. Point text is probably used the most often. It's also the most simple to create. You just click anywhere and you start going. So that's how you create point text inside of Illustrator. Now that we understand that basic premise, let's move on to the other kind of text that exists inside of Illustrator, which is called area text.
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