Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

You can adjust the leading value directly from the Character

panel (or from the Character panel pop-up menu by clicking

the word Character in the control panel), but there’s also a

keyboard shortcut that allows you to adjust it without chang-

ing tools and see your changes as you go. Press Alt+ or Alt+

(Option- or Option-) to adjust the leading up or down by

0.5 points (assuming you changed your preferences as directed

in the sidebar). Adding the Ctrl (or ) key increases the change

to fi ve times the normal value. After each keypress, the value

updates in the Character panel; once you’ve reached a leading

of 15 pt, you should have the spacing shown in Figure 4-19.

11. Change the byline tracking. I’d like the byline to fi ll out more

of the space under the title, but I don’t want to change the point

size. What I want is to increase the space between the charac-

ters; this attribute is known as tracking. You

can adjust the tracking directly from the

Character panel, but there is (you guessed

it) a shortcut. Press Alt+ and Alt+ (Op-

tion- and Option-) to adjust the tracking

out or in by

5

/1000 of an em space. A tracking

value of 0 uses standard spacing. Negative

numbers reduce the space between letters,

or tighten the tracking, while positive num-

bers increase the space, or loosen the track-

ing. Keep loosening the tracking until the

byline takes up roughly the space under

the six center capitals in the title (around a

value of 130 or so), like that in Figure 4-20.

That’s it for now. Save your work, because

we’ll be returning to this poem once again

in the next exercise. I’ll demonstrate how

to work with area type, and fl ow text from

one text frame to the next.

Editing Area Type

Now that you’ve learned the basics of formatting text, it’s time to turn

your attention to working with area type. Area type behaves much

more like type in traditional layout programs: Text automatically

wraps inside its text block, and text can fl ow from one block to the

next. The best use of area type is for longer passages of text—say,

body copy for an advertisement or the legalese present on nearly

Figure 4-19 .

Figure 4-20 .

122

Lesson 4: Creating and Formatting Text

every piece of printed material. In this exercise, you’ll use area type

to work with the fi rst two stanzas of our poem.

1.

Open the poem in progress. If you have your fi le from

the end of the preceding exercise, open it now. Oth-

erwise, open the document Area type.ai inside the

Lesson 04 folder.

2. Make the bounding box visible. Armed with

the black arrow tool, click anywhere on a line

of type in the body of the poem to select the

text box. Make the bounding box visible by

pressing Ctrl+Shift+B (-Shift-B on the Mac)

or choosing View➝Show Bounding Box. The

eight white-fi lled square handles should now

be visible.

3.

Resize the text block. Still using the black

arrow tool, resize and move the text block into

the approximate position shown in Figure 4-21.

Don’t worry about the red icon warning you

of overset text; we’ll fi x that in a later step.

4.

Lift the text attributes with the eyedropper

tool. Remember the eyedropper tool introduced

back on page 42 in Lesson 2? In addition to fi ll

and stroke attributes, the eyedropper tool can

lift text formatting attributes. Switch to the

tool in the toolbox (or press the I key). Move

the cursor over the byline to pick up its format-

ting. Note that when you pass the cursor over

the text, it switches to

. Click when you see

that icon to lift the text formatting, as shown

in Figure 4-22.

5.

Remove the indent. Unfortunately, the indent

on the type is still hanging on from the origi-

nal Word document. (You removed it from the

title back in Step 3 on page 118, but not from the

byline.) Click the word Paragraph in the con-

trol panel to bring up the paragraph options,

shown in Figure 4-23, and change the left in-

dent from 36 points to 0 points.

6.

Edit the point size, leading, and tracking. Now

that you’ve removed the indent, it’s time to

clean up the character-level formatting. Start

Figure 4-21 .

Figure 4-22 .

Figure 4-23 .

123

Editing Area Type