From the course: Illustrator 2021 Essential Training

Using point type - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator 2021 Essential Training

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Using point type

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- [Instructor] Illustrator has two different kinds of basic text. And by that, I mean there are other options such as text on a path and vertical text variations, but the two base variations are point and area text. What I'm going to do here in this file is I'm actually going to hide some of these layers. Okay, and I've got a layer here ready for some text. And I'm going to bring in some text from a text file that I've got here. I'll just grab this text from the top and copy that, come back into Illustrator, and I'm simply going to paste it. Okay, now, paste like so. Okay, and this is point text. The way you can tell is by looking for two particular things. Firstly, if you can see a point somewhere on the text like that, usually on the left-hand side, but not necessarily, then it's definitely point text. If it has a boundary around it like this, but no small white box down in the bottom right-hand corner or the top left, then it's definitely point text. For contrast, I'm just going to get some other text in here. Okay, so I'm going to grab all of this chunk here down in the bottom, okay, and copy that. Then I'm going to get my type tool, okay, T for the type tool. And I'm going to drag a box like so. Now, it fills up with some placeholder text to start with, but I'm going to paste into that the content I had, which is not entirely different, to be perfectly honest. Okay, if I hit Escape to come out of the active text, you will see that there's a small white box just here. And there's a box down on the right-hand side, just here. Now, this happens to be red. We'll find out more about that in just a moment. Okay, so point text emanates or originates, to be more accurate, from a particular point. What I'm going to do is just zoom out a little bit and pan across just a touch. And in my paragraph options here, I'm going to hit a line center. Now, you'll see that the text has moved. That's because the point here is the origin of the text. And we've just said, right, you need to start here, so it's spread out either side of that. If I choose right align, the text disappears off over there because the origin is here. Hopefully, that makes sense. Now, most of the time, you won't have to worry too much about that. But where you do have to be careful is when you're resizing content, because with an area text, it is just like InDesign. You're creating an area for the text to flow into. Point text is slightly different. If you drag one of the corners here, and you don't hold down Shift, you will distort your text. Okay, what you're actually doing there is one of the character options we'll see in the next movie. So I'm just going to undo that just for now. Okay, I'll turn our layout back on, or specifically, I'll turn a part of it on here for these guides that I have for the text. I'm going to bring my text frame or my area text down into this region here. Okay, and let's zoom back in on that. And I'm just going to pop it right into that corner, like so, and then resize the frame so it's the same size, more or less, as the guide. Because the other advantage with area text is you can thread the frames throughout a layout. So if I click here now, the overflow text is loaded into my document. Okay, and I can drag across like so, and I can repeat that just here. And now I've got three threaded frames for my text to flow in and through. Most of the time, in all likelihood, if you're creating illustrations in here, you will use point text. But area text is there when you need the flexibility of a frame.

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