From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

972 Snapping to letterforms in Illustrator

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

972 Snapping to letterforms in Illustrator

- Hey, gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Today, we're inside the most recent version of Adobe Illustrator, which allows you to snap one or more graphic objects to the outlines of characters of live, editable type. Now Adobe calls this feature Snap to Glyph, where glyph is synonymous with a character of type, whether it's a letter, number, or symbol. But I'm suggesting that it's more helpful to think of this feature as snap to letter form, where letter form is the outline of any given character. It's just as if you had converted the type to path outlines, except that the text remains editable. Plus, you can snap to such structural elements as x-height, baseline, and more. Illustrator has never allowed you to snap to the letter forms or baselines in the past, but now, it allows you to do it like crazy. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, if you're working along with me, a few things to note upfront. First of all, if I select this type, you can see over here in the control panel that it is live, editable type that is set to the font Source Serif Variable, which ships along with recent versions of Illustrator. Meaning that I can edit the type anytime I like. I don't want to do that, so I'll undo that change and press the escape key in order to exit the text entry mode. Now I want you to press control + K, or command + K on the Mac which brings up the preferences dialog box. You can remember K because it stands for this first value, keyboard increment. Now I'm going to select Smart Guides in the left-hand list. And notice, in the most recent versions of Illustrator, we have this glyph guides option which is set by default to this light shade of green which will become important in a moment. Also notice that my snapping tolerance is set to its default of four points. I didn't make any changes. So I'm just going to cancel out. Now I'll go to the view menu, and I want you to note this command right here. If it reads hide bounding box, go ahead and choose the command in order to hide that bounding box. If it reads show bounding box, you can leave it alone. Next I'll return to the view menu. And I want you to see, for the moment, Smart Guides are turned off. We'll come back to that in a minute or so. Also, you want snap to grid to be turned off. That's essential for this feature to work. And Snap to Glyph needs to be turned on. All right, now I'll select this dash line up here toward the top of the art board and I'm going to to drag it more or less in the middle right there. And I want you to see what happens. Notice that my cursor looks like a black arrow until I snap into alignment with an anchor point associated with that editable type. And this is new behavior, by the way, that was introduced toward the end of the year 2020. And so I can snap to all kinds of points. Some points, it's not going to work. Notice, I'm still seeing the black arrow head as opposed to the white one, which indicates that I have a snap. Not only down here at the bottom of the P, but down here at the bottom of its curve as well. So all sorts of snapping opportunities that are available to you. All right, I'm going to undo that move. What if I want to snap this line to the x-height, which is the top of the flat lower case characters? That's not happening right now. And that's because I need Smart Guides to be turned on. So I'll return to the view menu and choose Smart Guides in order to turn that command on. And now notice if I drag right about here, let's say, while pressing the shift key, so I'm constraining the angle of my drag to exactly vertical, just to the left of the capital letter T, we're seeing a green Smart Guide that reads x-height. And so I've snapped to the exact x-height associated with this font at this type size which happens, for what it's worth, to be 300 points. All right, now I'll select this solid line and I'll drag it down while pressing the shift key. And notice, at this point, right here, I'm snapping into alignment with the baseline as indicated by the green Smart Guide. And so as you can see, the capital letter T sits exactly on that baseline while the curving character such as the bottom edge of the P and the O descend below. All right, now, I'm going to make a few copies of this dash line right here, starting by dragging it upward while pressing the shift key. I also want to make a copy of this line, so I'll press and hold the alt key. That's going to be the option key on the Mac. And so I have both shift and alt down here on the PC. That's shift and option on the Mac. Until I snap into alignment, I want you to notice that green Smart Guide to the left of the letter T reads glyph bound. All right, now I'll do the same thing. I'll drag this guy down while pressing the shift and alt keys until I nap to the bottom of the glyph bound, which occurs in this case at the bottom-most edge of this lowercase letter y. All right, now let's try our hand at aligning these horizontal lines with the second line of type. And so I'm going to start by switching over to the layers panel. And then I'll click in the top-right corner of this lines layer in order to select all four lines independently of the type. And now, I'll drag any one of these lines, really doesn't matter which one, I'll go with the x-height line. And as I drag, I'll press the shift and alt keys. That's going to be shift and option on the Mac. Notice down in the bottom right-corner of the window. We're seeing a green word glyph. That's telling us that we're snapping into alignment with the bottom-most edge of that lowercase letter y. And you'll know that you're getting the correct results if the DY value in your heads up display, right there next to the cursor, reads 360 points. And that's because I've set the leading value to 360 points for this text object. At which point, I'll go ahead and release in order to create a copy of those four lines. And I'll change the color of the stroke to this bright shade of orange. And as you can see, I've exactly snapped into alignment with the cap height, the x-height, the baseline and the bottom of that bottom-most descender. Now, what if you want to snap into alignment with the top of that top-most ascender, in this case, associated with this lowercase h. And then, I'll go ahead and drag this guy while pressing the shift and alt keys. That's going to be shift and option on the Mac. And notice over there to the left of my cursor, I'm seeing that green Smart Guide that reads glyph bound. All right, now I'll click off that line just so we can check our work by turning on the labels layer up here at the top of the layers panel. And you can see that in the end, I've correctly identified the cap height, the x-height, the baseline, and the descender, as well as where the second line of type is concerned, the ascender, which is generally higher than the cap height. And that's how you snap graphic objects into alignment with editable letter forms with the help of Smart Guides, combined with the Snap to Glyph option here inside the most recent version of Adobe Illustrator. Looking forward to next week, that's when I show you how to snap a graphic object to the outline of a specific character of live, editable type, once again, inside the most recent version of Adobe Illustrator Deke's Techniques each and every week, keep watching.

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