Converting type to outlines

I'm still working inside the Ghost Robot assets.ai file, found inside the 11_printing folder. In this exercise, I am going to show you how to convert the text inside of your document to path outlines, which ensures that everything is going to print exactly the way that you expect it to. Now, I have already shown you all of the fonts that I am using inside of my document. I didn't show you each and every line of text. But it's all summed up by Birch Std, News Gothic Std and Adobe Caslon Pro. But I can confirm that if I want to from the Bridge. So I'll go up here and click on the Go to Bridge icon, which takes me to the Adobe Bridge, which you may recall ships with every version of Illustrator out there.

And I've got the Bridge trained on the contents of the 11_printing folder, inside my exercise_files folder. And I've gone ahead and selected Ghost Robot assets.ai here inside the Content panel. The next step is to bring up your Metadata panel. And I am going to increase the Height of that panel, so I can see this item right there, Fonts. And notice that the Bridge goes ahead and lists the three fonts that I am using inside of this document. That is the three font families, which are, as you know, Adobe Caslon Pro, Birch Std, and News Gothic Std as well. Alright! I'm going to switchback to Illustrator.

So let's say you get on the phone with your commercial printer and you ask him whether they have those fonts, just read the fonts off to him and make sure they have got them. In all likelihood, if they are a printer of merit, then they have access to every single Adobe font file out there, as well as fonts from other vendors. However, if you're working with a discount printer, very possible they don't have that font available to them. In which case they may say to you, go ahead and bundle that font file along with the illustration, zip it all up, send it to our FTP and so on.

And you might decide that's a terrific idea to give them the font file and let them work with that. Or you may decide, you know what, just doesn't seem safe, because if Birch Std gets substituted for some other font. Let's say, I switch just to the next font down in my system, Blackadder ITC, why then, I'm in trouble. I'm not going to get the effect that I want at all. So I might be better off saying, forget about the fonts, I am just going to go ahead and convert all of my text to path outlines. And here is how that works. I'll go ahead and press Ctrl+Z, Cmd+Z on the Mac.

This works best when you're working with large display font. In other words, when you're working with small text, like the text that I've used to highlight the other authors in this publication, or an even better example would be body copy, why, in that case your characters are going to shift a little bit, thanks to something that's known as hinting, that's included with text that's set in an actual professionally rendered font. Anyway, let me give you a sense of what that means. I'm going to switch over to my Layers panel. And notice that I've got this layer right here on top called type.

That contains all of the text inside of this document. So I'll go ahead and Alt+Click or Option+ Click on that type layer to select all of my text. And then, very simple trick by the way, you go up to the Type Menu and you choose the Create Outlines command. But before you do that actually, very good idea to go up to the File Menu and choose the Save command to save any updates to your document. To make sure it's completely saved with that editable text intact. Because you don't want to save over this file.

You don't want to get rid of your editable text. You just want to create an alternative version of this file with path outlines. Anyway, I've already done that, so I'll go back up to the Type Menu and choose the Create Outlines command. You've got a Keyboard Shortcut of Ctrl+Shift+ O, Cmd+Shift+O on the Mac, if you like. That's one that Adobe has provided for you. And notice what happens is that, we get all of our type now rendered as path outlines. So you are going to keep all those specialty attributes incidentally. If I click off the text and then click on this text right here, the author of the main story, and then I switch back to the Appearance panel, notice that I still have Pucker & Bloat.

I still have all of my Fill and Stroke attributes, along with the Transform effects as well. So everything is still intact, except for that base font. But here is what I want you to see, I want you to see how that does slightly shift the appearance of your text. So I am going to go ahead and Zoom way in here on this smaller text. And I'll press Ctrl+Z or Cmd+Z on the Mac in order to undo the conversion of that text to outlines, so that you can see what it looked like. Did you see a very slight shift on screen? And I am going to press Ctrl+H or Cmd+H on the Mac so that we don't see the various selection elements, because that will get in your way of telling the difference between live text, like we're seeing right now.

And if I press Ctrl+Shift+C or Cmd+Shift +C on the Mac, this is the converted text. And what you are going to see is you are going to see the characters thicken up slightly, they are going to get a little bit thicker looking. And that is a function ultimately of this technology that's known as hinting. So what happens in your standard, everyday, average, professional level font is, when you start reducing the size of your characters, they don't necessarily look the same, they don't necessarily read as well, as when that text is set larger.

So as the text gets smaller, the font actually calls out for some of the characteristics of the characters to change, so that the text remains nice and legible at small sizes. When that hinting gets interpreted, the text is converted to outlines, the text does tend to thicken up ever so slightly. So it is something to be watchful of. It's not necessarily adversely affecting the legibility of the text in this case, but it does change things ever so slightly. Another area of this document that's going to show off this effect is over on Artboard #5.

And I'm going to get there incidentally by bringing up my Navigator panel, remember that guy. I'll go ahead and click on my little Navigation Wheel there, inside of this column of icons, to bring up the Navigation panel. And right now I am looking at this section of my large 5 Artboard document. I am going to go ahead and drag this guy over here. Instead, there is a t-shirt variation of Ghost Robot. And I'll be showing you what's going on inside of the Artboards in the next exercise, but for now, notice that there is this little text here inside of the t-shirt, and this is also set in Birch Std or at least it was set in Birch Std before I converted the text to path outlines.

So this is what the text looked like originally. I press Ctrl+Z, Cmd+Z on the Mac, let's Zoom in even farther there. And this is what the text looks like now that its been converted. So again, a slight thickening of the characters. However, now, there is no font being used in this document. So I am going to go ahead and switch back to that first Artboard, by going to the Artboards panel and double- clicking on Magazine cover, in order to center that Artboard and also send my view size to a 100%. I will Zoom out a little bit, I am Zooming out to 90%, because that way I can see all of my artwork.

And then, I'll go up to the File Menu. This is very important, by the way. Do not choose Save, because then you'll wipe out your editable text, you'll lose it. Instead, choose Save As, Ctrl+ Shift+S, Cmd+Shift+S on the Mac. And then let's go ahead and change the name of this document to Ghost Robot outlines, like so. And I'll click on the Save button. And something else that's very important to note here. Because this is a multi-Artboard document, you definitely need to save it as Illustrator CS4 or CS5. So you can't go back too far.

If you go to CS3 or earlier, then you are not going to have multiple Artboards. You are going to have to save each and every Artboard as a separate document, which is going to be a pain in the neck. So what I suggest is, if you're using multiple Artboards and you're working with a commercial printer, make sure that they have at least Illustrator CS4. So they need CS4 or CS5 to be able to print your documents, unless you are going to export your documents as PDF files. That's the other way to work. Alright. So anyway, I am just going to go ahead and save this off as an Illustrator CS5 Document, and I'll click OK in order to save that file.

And a moment later you can see it's all saved, ready to go. I'll switch back to the Bridge, and you can see I've got this new document now called Ghost Robot outlines. I'll go ahead and click on it to make it active. I'll scroll down here, inside the Metadata panel, notice there is no Fonts item anymore. So there is Ghost Robot assets.ai. It has this item, under IPTC Core, we have got an item called Fonts, with Caslon Pro, Birch Std, News Gothic Std. Switch over to Ghost Robot outlines.ai. There is not even a Fonts item there anymore, because we have no fonts inside of this document.

That means it's going to open without a warning. That means it's going to look good on anybody's system, regardless of what fonts they have available. So again, remember that you've got that available to you under the Type Menu, it's the Create Outlines command. In the next exercise, we are going to take a look at our Artboards, and we will also investigate the Links panel.