From the course: InDesign Secrets
268 Techniques to convert text to outlines - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
268 Techniques to convert text to outlines
- [Instructor] Maybe you need to convert some text to outlines, I'm not talking about converting all the text in your document to outlines, but just a little bit. Now, we've shared in another InDesign secrets movie how you should deal with converting a whole document to outlines and why you should try to avoid it. But sometimes, you do need to convert just a word or a phrase to outlines for some special effect, like putting a picture inside the text or something like that. Now, if you need to do that, there are a few things that you need to understand about converting to outlines, so I want to cover that here. The first thing you need to decide when converting text to outlines is whether you want all the text in a frame or just some of the text. If you want all the text, then select the frame with the selection tool, but if you want just some of the text, then select just that text with the type tool. So for example, I can double click here, which is to the type tool and then I'll select just two characters inside this text. I'll go up to the Type menu, and I'll choose Create Outlines. Now, several different things just happened. First, the text was converted to outlines. So, that's a path now. It's no longer editable text. Next, it replaced the text that I had selected. It deleted the editable text and it put this text shaped frame in as an inline object instead. And finally, did you see how this other text to the right moved slightly? That usually happens when you convert just a piece of text rather than the whole frame. And the reason is that these aren't letters anymore, so any kerning or tracking on them is removed. Okay, let me undo that by pressing Command + z or Ctrl + z on Windows. Now it's back to editable text and I'm going to do the same thing, but this time, I'm going to hold down the Option key on the Mac or the Alt key on Windows when I choose Create Outlines. Now as you know, Option or Alt means duplicate the object, and in fact, that's exactly what happened here. InDesign converted the text, but it did not delete the original. It made a copy of it. See, I can choose the selection tool, and just drag this copy out here. So, it's a separate frame, right? But it's not text, it's outlines. And I can see those outlines by choosing the direct selection tool, otherwise known as the white arrow tool. See how you can now see the points on the path? Now that trick with the Option or Alt key works for the whole frame too. For example, I'll delete those paths just by pressing the Delete key, and now I'm going to grab the selection tool, select the whole frame, and I'm going to hold down the Opt or the Alt key when I choose Create Outlines. So now I have two different frames, the one that's shaped like text, I'll pull that down here, and now I can do stuff with this text. For example, I'll go to the File menu, and I'll choose Place, and then I'm going to choose this picture and click OK. And now you can see that picture, I can place that picture inside part of this text. Now why did the picture just go inside the top part of the text? Well, when you convert more than one line of text into outlines, each line becomes its own object, and then those objects become grouped together. So in this case, there's two different objects: the word InDesign and the word Secrets. They're grouped together, but when I place the image, it just went into one of those objects. So again, the original text frame is up here, that's still editable text. And I have this group of objects down here. Now, there's one more thing you need to understand about how InDesign coverts text to outlines. I'm going to go up to the Object menu and Ungroup these objects so that I have two different objects. First, the word InDesign and second the word Secrets. Now all of this moves together, so it looks like another group, right? But it's not a group. This is a single path, just one object. Now technically, this is called a compound path because it's a collection of separate paths. Sometimes, you'll find you need to break these up into separate objects. And I can do that by going to the Object menu, choosing the Paths submenu, and then choosing Release Compound Path. So, that worked, but some of the text changed a little bit. Specifically, the counters or the holes inside the letter e were removed. Well, they weren't removed, but they no longer look like holes. When you release your compound paths, anything that looks like a hole is lost because all of those are separate paths now, and this is a royal pain, but I just don't think there's any good way around it. If you release the compound paths, you have to put those letters back together again. And there are various ways to do that, but by far the easiest way is to go to the Window menu, choose Object & Layout, and then choose Pathfinder. Next, select the paths that you want to affect, in this case the outline of the e and the outline of the hole in the e. And then, in the Pathfinder section of the Pathfinder panel, click the second button, that's the subtract button. That means take the top object and knock a hole in the bottom object. So, now that character is back to being its own little compound path, but it's separate from these other letters. See how I can pull it out? Now I can select the objects from the other e, click that button again, and we're back in business. Anyway, these are a few of the most important things that you need to keep in mind when you're converting text to outlines.
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Contents
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229 Batch converting ID files to current version with the Book panel6m 9s
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230 Getting around InDesign limitations6m 46s
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231 Creating better callout lines with effects and object styles5m 47s
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232 Swapping column and row information in tables6m 9s
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233 Making bigger text link targets4m 52s
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161 Keeping page numbers on top of master items3m 55s
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162 Adding automatic currency symbols in a table cell or before text3m 50s
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163 Make a pop-up footnote for your ebook3m 48s
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164 Deleting tabs at the beginning of paragraphs and applying a paragraph style3m 10s
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165 Five InDesign Presentation tips6m 28s
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111 Packaging images on the pasteboard3m 32s
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112 Automatically updating figure references for books6m 9s
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113 Adding Tool Tips to your form fields in InDesign3m 21s
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114 Setting poetry, flush left, center on longest line3m 54s
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115 Use bookmarks to navigate long documents in production4m 57s
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107 Using the same keyboard shortcut for two different commands with the Context feature5m 22s
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108 Making a text highlighter3m 33s
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109 Updating an interactive PDF without losing work done in Acrobat5m 30s
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110 Adding custom text at the beginning of each line automatically4m
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089 Three great Object Styles for any designer8m 1s
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090 Choosing alpha channel image transparency2m 25s
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091 Adding and reading metadata for InDesign files3m 25s
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092 Adding ALT tags to your images6m 59s
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093 How to Place & Link a text frame's text but not its formatting7m 4s
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094 Setting the baseline position of a caption2m 39s
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051 Five things that should be in every new file5m 19s
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052 Forcing EPUB page breaks with invisible objects6m 21s
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053 Understanding component information6m 39s
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054 Creating running heads using section markers4m 16s
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055 Making a font with InDesign using the IndyFont script5m 20s
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056 Finding where that color is used7m 17s
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047 Specifying an exact amount of space between objects5m 17s
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048 Fixing last lines that are too short8m 16s
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049 Creating web graphics from your InDesign artwork7m 20s
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050 Using “No Language” to suppress unwanted hyphenation, spell-checking, and smart quotes2m 48s
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037 Updating a linked table without losing formatting5m 18s
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038 Creating electronic sticky notes4m 49s
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039 Moving master page items to the top layer for visibility2m 48s
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040 Five guide tricks that will impress your coworkers6m 18s
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041 Letting InDesign add the diacritics4m 21s
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042 Using single-cell table cells for custom paragraph formatting6m 2s
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027 Creating running heads using variables5m 1s
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028 Live Caption tips and tricks8m 3s
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029 Making professional drop caps10m 37s
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030 Making two-state buttons in interactive documents5m 5s
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031 Moving pages from one document to another3m 15s
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032 Wrapping bulleted text around a curve5m 58s
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007 Selecting through and into objects using cmd-click and Select Above/Below5m 46s
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008 Some great tips and tricks for the Swatches panel9m 40s
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009 Saving down for backward compatibility with INX and IDML5m 54s
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010 Using the INX and IDML formats to fix problems4m 46s
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