Convert all text to path outlines

In his first movie I'll show you how to convert all the text inside a document to pass outlines and while it might seem like a weird place to start, given that this chapter is about printing, what it does is that it ensures that whether you're sending a document out to a commercial printhouse or whether you're just sharing the document with a colleague The person on the receiving end can go ahead and open your document inside Illustrator. Without any font warnings. And all of your texts will render out. Just as you had created it in the first place.

Also, it insures that somebody else can't modify the text inside your document. So they're not going to introduce new mistakes. Of course you want to make sure all of your text is good to go before you convert it, because once you convert your text to path outlines you can no longer edit it. So with all that in mind here is how it works, we are going to start things out in Adobe Bridge which is included with the creative cloud but you have to download it independently assuming that you have you can get to Bridge as follows I'm going to click on this little boomerang inside the Bridge interface.

To return to the last Creative Cloud application I use which is Illustrator. If you're in Illustrator you can get to Bridge by going up to the File menu and choosing Browse in Bridge. Then, if you're working along with me, you'll want to drag Bridge to the Content of the 20 print folder. And notice that I have this file selected called Ghost Robot assets.ai. It contains a total of five art boards. So you select this document just by clicking on it, and then assuming the default workspace, which is Essentials, you can click on it if need be, up here at the top of the screen.

Then you'll see a Preview panel in the upper right corner. And I can make that Preview panel larger by dragging down on this horizontal bar. And I can also drag on the vertical bar, if I like. But I'm just going to leave it about this size there. And when you're looking at the contents of the Preview panel, you can advance from one art board to another by clicking on these little arrows. So, this is the first art board, which shows the cover for this magazine. And then, if I advance to the second art board, this is an alternate cover.

And then the third art board contains the art work without any of the text. The fourth and fifth art boards contain additional assets. So they're essentially mock ups of what the artwork might look like on a skate board or a surf board or finally on a t-shirt. Now these art boards aren't actually meant to print the artwork on a t-shirt. They're just mock-ups and nothing more. So anyway, I just wanted to give you a sense of what's going on. Meanwhile, we have this Metadata panel down here at the bottom. And you can switch between panels just as you can inside of Illustrator by clicking on their tabs.

And notice that the metadata starts off with these file properties. You can go ahead and twirl those closed, and you should see A list of fonts, and these fonts include Adobe Cazlon Pro, which ships along with the creative cloud, along with Birch and a few styles of News Gothic, which may or may not be included on your system. So if I go ahead and double-click on this file to open it up in Illustrator I'm going to get this Font warning right here, and I can make it larger if I like, which is telling me that I'm missing Birch and all three styles of News Gothic.

My options are to Cancel the opening process, in which case it will not open the document. Or, I can click on the Open button. If I do that, I'm going to substitute the font. So I'll go ahead and click on Open, and you can see that some things have gone wrong here. So if I switch back to Bridge by going up to File menu and choosing Browse and Bridge, we can see this thumbnail right here. And I can make it bigger by pressing the space bar, and that's going to show me a small preview of the file. And we can see that we have this very special treatment assigned to Thum Thimbleson, as well as this nice text in the upper-left-hand corner.

I'll go ahead and press the Escape key in order to escape the preview, and click on the little boomerang to return to Illustrator, which shows the text in the upper-left corner, and that text Thum Thimbleson. Quite differently, and the problem, of course, is that I'm missing the proper fonts. So what I need to do is open the Fonts Control panel here in the PC, and I'll go ahead and grab this News Gothic type, and I'll copy it into the Font panel, and I also want to grab this. Birch font, and this is not going to be available to you unless you buy these fonts from Adobe, but I happen to have them readily available.

And as soon as I go ahead and install these fonts, as I've done, then I can return to Illustrator, and notice that the text automatically updates. All right, so obviously, that can be a frustrating process for somebody on the receiving end of your document. Fortunately, you can ensure that there will be no font warnings, if you convert all of your text to Path Outlines. The text will no longer be editable, of course, but its appearance will be preserved. Now, I've gone ahead and collected all of my type on this layer called Type at the top of the stack. So I can Alt+Click or Opt+Click on that layer name to select all the text.

But, what's more likely is that your text is going to be all over the place. So, to select all the text inside of a document. Across all art boards, here's what you do. I'll first click off the text to deselect it, and then I'll go up to the Select menu, choose Object and then notice these various commands that you have available to you. I could just go ahead and choose Point Type Objects because all the text in this document is expressed as point type or I could select Area Type if I wanted to select just the area type inside a document.

Or if you want to select everything go ahead and choose all text objects. And then it'll select just the text like you see here. And then you want to go up to the Type menu and choose Create Outlines. Of course you'd want to make sure to spell check your document. Read through it, make sure all the grammar is correct. And finally, you want to make sure you have the fonts. So you might not want to follow along with me, because you probably don't have these fonts on your system. But in my case, I can just go ahead and choose this command, or press the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+shift+O, or Cmd+shift+O on a Mac, in order to convert that text to path outlines.

But before I do, I want to show you one more thing. I'm going to press Ctrl+Z or Cmd+Z on a Mac to undo that operation. I'll click off the text to de-select it, and I'm going to go ahead and zoom in on this text right here, Thumb Thimbleson, on the first art board, and I'll click on its baseline to select that text. And then I'll switch over to the Appearance panel, which you can also get by choosing Appearance from the Window menu. And notice that we have a single fill assigned to this text, along with a collection of three different strokes. And then I have this dynamic effect Pucker and Bloat.

And if I turn it off, you can see that this is the standard text albeit complete with the fill and stroke attributes but without the dynamic effects. So we have these flat lines at the top of the characters where as soon as I turn on Pucker and Bloat, we have these wonderful little curves. Now the reason I'm showing you that is because I want you to see that, that information is preserved. So I'll go back to the Select menu choose Object and choose All Text Objects and then I'll go back to the Type menu and choose Create Outlines.

Now I'll press Ctrl+Shift+A, or Cmd+Shift+A on a Mac, to deselect the paths, and I'll click on just this text right there. Notice that it's all grouped together. All the letters inside this particular text object are expressed now as a group. And all of my attributes here inside the Appearance panel are preserved. So I still have that feel. I've got my three strokes and I have Pucker and Bloat as well. So if I turn off Pucker and Bloat, there are my original characters. And if I turn it back on, we can see the curved edges.

So all that you're doing is taking the individual characters of type, and converting them to static path outlines. However, all your dynamic effects are preserved. Alright, now I'll press Ctrl+Shift+A, or Cmd+Shift+A on the Mac. The next step is to go up to the File menu And chose not Save, because then you'll override your original document, but rather chose the Save As command. And I've already gone ahead and saved this version of the document as no fonts required so that you can open this document on your machine Without any font warnings in future movies.

So I'll go ahead and Cancel out, and I'll return to the File menu and choose Browse in Bridge, so we can take a look at that document, it's right next door in alphabetical order, no fonts required. And notice, here inside the Metadata panel that we no longer have a little fonts area, and that's because there are no fonts included with this documents. Which means that you can go ahead and double click on this file in order to open it in Illustrator. Without seeing a single font warning and that, friends, is how you create the safest document possible, by converting all of the text inside the document across all layers and art boards to vector based path outlines here inside Illustrator.