From the course: Illustrator 2020 One-on-One: Fundamentals

Placing and flowing text - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator 2020 One-on-One: Fundamentals

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Placing and flowing text

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- [Instructor] All right, here's the final version of our document. It's simple, it's honest, and it's compu-fit, meaning that every single line of type exactly fits its space, which is something that Illustrator absolutely excels at. So I'll start things off, as I so often do, by going up to the File menu and choosing New from Template, and then I'll go ahead and load that file, RGB with center guides, and click New in order to create a new untitled document, and now you can create some text directly inside Illustrator, if you want, or you can import text that you've created in a text editor, or a word processor, or what have you, and you do that by going up to the File menu and choosing the Place command, or you have that keyboard shortcut of Control + Shift + P, or Command + Shift + P on the Mac, and I'm going to navigate to my 08_text folder, which right now just contains a couple of documents. When you see it, it'll contain much more, and then you want to click on the Place button, but notice that Show Import Options is turned off, that check box, and yet when I click on Place, I still get the import options, and they're of no use to me whatsoever. This is not stuff you need to pay attention to, so I'll just go ahead and click OK. This is worth paying attention to. I have now loaded my cursor with text, which means I can click anywhere I want in order to determine the top-left corner of an automatic text block. So I'll just go ahead and click, like so, and that goes ahead and automatically places the text inside of a frame, but let's say you want to draw the frame instead, then just go ahead and press Control + Z, or Command + Z on a Mac, which may make you think you've reloaded your cursor, as in the case of InDesign, for example, however if I were to drag now with this cursor, I would just go ahead and fill my text frame with a bunch of nonsensical placeholder text, which is not what I want, so I'll go ahead and undo that action, and I'll return to the File menu, and once again choose the Place command, once again find that file, just double-click on it this time, click OK in response to the import options, and then instead of clicking, I'll go ahead and drag in order to draw a frame of what's known as area text inside Illustrator, meaning that the text fits inside of, in this case, a rectangular area. All right, now to accept your change, all you have to do is press the Escape key in order to escape out of the text entry mode. All right, now notice that I'm seeing a few formatting options up here in the horizontal control panel, namely the font, the style, and the type size. I'm going to go ahead, for the sake of demonstration here, and crank the type size up to 36 points, and that is going to affect the text, even though it's selected with the standard Black Arrow tool, and notice that the text now exceeds the size of the frame as indicated by this little plus sign which tells me that I have what's known as overflow text, and so if I wanted to place this text, presumably on a different artboard, then I would click on that plus sign in order to load up my cursor, as we're seeing right here, and then I'd just scoot over to that artboard. I'm asking you to imagine it, because I don't want to create another artboard right now, and then I would just drag, like so, in order to fill a new frame with that overflow text, and notice that the two frames are now threaded together as indicated by this diagonal line. I still, however, have overflow text, as indicated by this little plus sign, and so to place it, I'll just click on the plus sign once again, and then I will drag to draw another frame, and once I no longer see the plus sign, it means that I am done placing all the text. All right, in my case, however, the text repeats over and over again, so I actually want to get rid of a bunch of it, so I'm going to press Control + Z, or Command + Z on the Mac as many times as it takes in order to get rid of all that overflow text right there, and yet notice that my cursor is still loaded, so I'll press Control + Z, or Command + Z again to unload it, so that I just have the standard Black Arrow cursor, and now I'm going to get rid of all my overflow text by switching to the Type tool. This guy right here looks like a capital T, and its keyboard shortcut is T as well, so I could just go ahead and switch to it by clicking on it, or even more easily, I could just double-click inside my text, and that's going to switch me to the Type tool automatically as we're seeing here, and it'll go ahead and position my blinking insertion marker, this guy right there. All right, I want the insertion marker to be one character over, however, so I'm just going to click right at this location, or I could just press the Right Arrow key to move that blinking insertion marker over. Now, notice if I were to press the Shift key along with the Right Arrow key, in this case, that I will start selecting text. So with the Shift key down, the Arrow keys select things. If you press Control + Shift together, that's going to be Command + Shift on a Mac, along with the Right Arrow key you're going to select entire words at a time, and then if you press Control + Shift + Down Arrow, that's going to be Command + Shift + Down Arrow on a Mac, you'll select all the way to the end of this paragraph, and this entire document happens to be a single paragraph, by the way, so we're selecting everything after the period after the word enjoy, and now I'll press the Backspace key, or the Delete on the Mac, to get rid of all that repetitive text, and then finally to accept my changes, I'll press the Escape key in order to escape the text entry mode. Also notice that switches me automatically back from the Type tool to the previously selected Black Arrow tool, and that very simply is how you place and flow text here inside Illustrator.

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