Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

Figure 4-3 .

Placing, Entering, and Editing Text

In the fi rst exercise, we’ll start with the basics: getting text

into Illustrator and editing it for content once it’s in your

artwork. As we move through the lesson, I’ll demonstrate

progressively more sophisticated ways to manipulate type,

but we’ve got to start somewhere.

1. Open a piece of artwork. Navigate to the

Lesson 04 subfolder inside the Lesson Files-

AIcs5 1on1 folder. Inside you’ll fi nd an Il-

lustrator fi le called Early poetry.ai. This poem is so

named not because it was one of my fi rst forays into

metered verse; I wrote it when my eldest son was very

young and had a penchant for removing his socks.

You should see artwork like that shown in Figure 4-3.

2. Hide the Type layer. Bring up the Layers panel by

pressing F7 (or choosing Windows➝Layers). This

document has two layers, Type and Card. In the next

few exercises, you’ll be recreating the Type layer, so

click the

icon to hide the layer.

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

If you examine the Card layer (you can twirl it open by

clicking the

arrow), you’ll notice only three objects in the

layer

—

two socks and a rectangle labeled scribbles. All the

strokes and fi lls you see on the Card layer are created by live

effects, which I cover in Lesson 10, but you can check them

out by selecting the scribbles object and viewing the effects

in the Appearance panel. You don’t need to concern yourself

with these effects, but if you’re interested to see how the

effects are done, they’re there to explore.

3. Create a new layer for your type. From within the

Layers panel, Alt-click (Option-click) the

icon to

create a new layer, as seen in Figure 4-4. Pressing the

Alt (or Option) key creates a new layer and simultane-

ously opens the Layer Options dialog box. Name the

new layer “My text,” change the Color to something

unique (I chose burgundy), leave the other options

unchanged, and click OK.

4. Move the new layer below the old layer. Move the

newly created layer by dragging it down between the

Type and Card layers, as in Figure 4-5. Release the

mouse button to complete the move.

Figure 4-4 .

Figure 4-5 .

112

Lesson 4: Creating and Formatting Text

Figure 4-6 .

5.

Import some text to the new layer. Choose

File➝Place to open the Place dialog box, as

shown in Figure 4-6. Navigate to the Lesson

04 subfolder inside the Lesson Files-AIcs5 1on1

Inside is a Microsoft Word document labeled That

sock.doc. Select the fi le, and click the Place button.

Illustrator now presents you with a Microsoft Word

Options dialog box, seen in Figure 4-7.

Note that Illustrator is capable of importing plain text

documents (ending with .txt) or rich text format documents

(ending in .rtf ) in addition to Word documents.

6. Dismiss the Word options dialog box. The table of

contents, footnotes, and index are fantastic features

when working on a long document (such as this

book), they tend to be overkill for Illustrator. While the multiple

artboards introduced in CS4 certainly allow you to simulate a

multipage layout in a document, Illustrator is poorly suited to

manage documents of any signifi cant length—the very kind of

documents that require these features.

The only option that will likely be useful to you is Remove Text

Formatting, which strips the placed text of all the formatting

applied inside Word. In this instance, you’ll be reformatting

the text regardless, so don’t bother to check the box.

Click OK to dismiss the dialog box.

7.

Turn on the bounding box. Your text should now be

in your illustration, as shown in Figure 4-8. If your

text looks anything like mine, the frame is oddly

sized and positioned. In nearly every layout or design

program, you could simply grab one of the corners

to resize the text box. But at the moment, Illustrator

is treating the corners of the box as standard corner

points, just as though you had drawn the shape with

the rectangle tool. (The standard corner points are

indicated by the small fi lled squares at the corners.)

To resize the text box, we need to make the bounding

box visible. Choose View ➝Show Bounding Box, or

press Ctrl+Shift+B (-Shift-B on the Mac). The cor-

ners should now turn into open squares, revealing

handles to manipulate the text box.

Figure 4-7 .

Figure 4-8 .

113

Placing, Entering, and Editing Text