Type Tips Weekly

- [Nigel] Hi, I'm Nigel French. Welcome to "Type Tips." Putting text around a circle is one thing, but what about running text along the path of a figure eight or indeed any path where the segments overlap? I'm doing this in Illustrator, but you could achieve the same effect in InDesign. I'm going to move to a second art board, and here I'll start out by drawing a circle. Now let's press shift + x so that we exchange the fill and the stroke. I'll now tap my c key so that I can switch to the scissors tool and come and break the path at the bottom anchor point. I'll select it and duplicate it. And then on this one, I'll spin it through 180 degrees so the break is at the top of the circle. Now let's zoom in. I'll tap a to access my direct selection tool. And I need to separate these endpoints. So let's pull that one down, that one down a bit, and this one up. So this anchor point needs to be connected with this one. I'll select that one. Hold down the shift key and select this one. Come to the Object menu and choose Path, Average. And I'm going to average across both axes. And then on my tool options, I'll click to connect the endpoints. I'll do the same with these two open endpoints. This time I'll use the keyboard shortcut to go to the Average command, which is cmd + opt or ctrl + alt + j. And once again, click to connect them. And then I'll swipe over those anchor points, return to Average once again, and average them along both axes, putting them back to their original locations. But we've now made a figure eight. So I'll come and choose my type. Going to select that, Command or Control + C to copy it. I'll switch to my Type on a Path Tool and click on that path. My path becomes filled with the placeholder text because I have that preference turned on, but I'll just press Command or Control + V to replace that with the text that is on my clipboard. When working with text on a circle or a curve, usually I find that text in all uppercase works best. So I'll press cmd or ctrl + t to bring up the Character panel and convert the type to all caps. You'll notice that when I put text on the path, the stroke color of the path disappeared, which in this case happens to be what I want. I'm now going to increase the size of the type by pressing cmd + shift + >. And if I go too far, I can see the end of story marker right here. I need to pull this back ever so slightly from the beginning of the story. And let's just select that type again. I'm going to go down to 24 points. A problem that we have is on the lower part of the figure eight, the type is actually running on the inside of the circle rather than the outside, giving the appearance of that circle being smaller. I'll fix that by coming to the Type menu and to my Type on a Path options where we want to align not to the baseline, but to the center. And then I need to insert a couple of break characters into the text. So if I can make an insertion point right there just before the last stanza. I'll come to the Type menu, and I have these WhiteSpace Characters, not as many as we have in InDesign, but enough for our needs right now. I'm going to add an Em Space. And if that's not enough, I'm going to add a second Em Space, this time using the keyboard short cmd + shift or ctrl + shift + m. And let's have one more, this time an En Space, cmd + shift + n for November. Actually, turns out I did need two, which would've been the same as an additional Em Space. So I could refine this maybe just by increasing the size ever so slightly and adjusting the tracking every so slightly. So I've gone slightly bigger and slightly tighter. But that is how we can put type around a continuous path and in this case a path that overlaps, first of all taking apart two circles and then joining them up as a figure eight.