Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

P E A R L O F W I S D O M

If you’re like me, you tend to rely heavily on keyboard shortcuts to

switch tools and access commands. But keyboard shortcuts won’t work

when editing text, right? There’s one that will, and it will allow you

access to all others. When editing text, press Ctrl+Enter (

-Return on

the Mac). This exits the type tool and returns you to the black arrow

tool; all keyboard shortcuts now function normally. And you don’t

even need to switch back to the type tool to resume editing

—

simply

double-click anywhere in the text, and you’ll return to the type tool

automatically.

That’s it for this exercise. You now know the basics of how to place

and edit text. In the next exercise, I’ll explain how to work with

point type, as well as cover basic text formatting. Save your work

because we’ll be picking up where we left off.

Applying Formatting and Effects

Getting text into your artwork is the obvious fi rst step, but without

being able to format the text, your illustration is unfi nished. In this

exercise, I’ll show you how to apply character and paragraph at-

tributes to your type, and even preview live effects (fully explored

in Lesson 10).

1.

Open the poem document. If you saved

your fi le from the preceding exercise, open

it now. Otherwise, open the catch-up docu-

ment Placed text.ai in the Lesson 04 folder.

2.

Select the title and byline type. With the black arrow

tool, click the baseline of either the title or the by-

line. (Press the V key to make the black arrow tool

active if it isn’t already.) You should see a burgundy

rectangle around the lines and a tiny point off to the

left, as shown in Figure 4-11. This point is the anchor

point for the type.

For mysterious reasons known only to Adobe, Illustrator

can be fl aky about displaying the anchor point. If you don’t

see it at fi rst, try minimizing and restoring the document

window.

You may be asking, “But why is the point so far

from the type? What gives, Deke?” Well, observant

reader, the text that was pulled over from the origi-

nal Word document was formatted with an indent,

Figure 4-11 .

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Applying Formatting and Effects