Type Tips Weekly

- [Nigel] Hi, I'm Nigel French. Welcome to Type Tips. This week, I'm going to give you some suggestions for how you can use type as image. I'm less interested in making the type here readable than I am in making it function as shading to fill a vector shape. But I don't want to use any old shape nor any old text. I'm going to put the text of the raven by Edgar Allan Poe into a raven shape. This technique is very easy to do badly. It takes a few extra steps to do it well and to be successful, we need to avoid gaps in the text or at the ends of the lines. The words should function as even gray shapes. It brings up some interesting considerations. Over on my paste board, I have the text. Now, the first thing I want to do is strip out all of the paragraph marks. All of them. So this is just going to run as one continuous stream of text. So in my Find/Change, I'll look for a paragraph mark and I'll change it to a space. Then I'm going to go to multiple space and convert that to a single space. I also want to think about those parts of the text that are going to create visual holes. And when I glance at the text, I see that there are a lot of em dashes. I'm going to convert those to en dashes. N, November. So that's Shift + Option + hyphen for the em, Option + hyphen for the en. And I think there might be some instances where the dash is followed by a word space. So let's remove that as well. To make my type as dense as possible with as little negative space as possible but still be just about readable, I'm going to use a typeface with a high x height. And what I'm going to use is Utopia. I do not want any hyphenation to occur, so I'm going to turn that off. And then, as you'll see in the finished version, I want a smooth edge. So I'm going to come and use the justify all lines alignment. At this point, I can cut the text. And paste it into the shape. These are the kinds of issues that we run into. See that we're going to have gaps, which we need to fill. We want them even denser to your type. Let me, before I go any further, remove the stroke from the shape. With all of the text selected, I'm going to go to the justification options. Command + Option + Shift or Control + Alt + Shift + J. Now, I hasten to add you would never use options like this for text that you actually wanted people to read. I'm going to use a value of 30% for the word spacing. And for the letter spacing, minus 10. Let's turn on the preview, see how that's affecting things. And then the glyph scaling. I'm going to allow the horizontal scaling of the characters to vary between 90% and 110%. Now, if you are a typographic purist, you may be having heart palpitations watching me do this. So you might want to look away. I now need to reduce the size of the type. Because I want to reduce it in very small increments, I'm going to come to my preferences. Units and increments. And turn this option down to .25 of a point. I'm using the keyboard shortcut, Command + Shift + lesser than or Control + Shift + lesser than. And I'm going to keep doing that until we see all of the type. You can see we still have some problems. I'll press Command + B to go to my Text Frame Options. Rather than put in a leading value, I want my text to go all the way from the top of the shape to the bottom of the shape. It's one continuous paragraph. I'm going to make my vertical justification justify. And now, and this builds upon a tip that I showed a few weeks ago, I'm going to insert between every character a zero width space. This will effectively allow the line break to happen anywhere. Anywhere it needs to. And in doing so, it's just going to allow me to get more in with less gaps. Of course, it's going to break words without hyphens. Again, this text is not for the purpose, primarily not for the purpose of reading. So I'll come to my Find/Change. I have a saved query, which is going to look for any character, replace it with that character, followed by the Unicode for a zero width space. And you see that by doing that, we get to fill in some of the spaces that were formally gaps. And now, I'm going to select all of the text and just see if I can increase its size a little bit more. So if you want to create a piece of art, a memento where the text and the shape have meaning and you want to combine them both, those are some of the things that you might want to consider.