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

962 New ways to scale type in Illustrator

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

962 New ways to scale type in Illustrator

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Now for the last century or more, you've been able to scale type by setting its point size. Such as, set that type in nine point Helvetica or big, like 24 point Helvetica, or if you really hate your readers, five point Helvetica. Only, what does that even mean? Here's some type set in Helvetica New scaled to a size of 200 points, which is actually 142.8 points tall or 182.4 points if you include the descenders, or 50.4 and 64.3 millimeters, respectively, if that's your thing. But now, Illustrator includes what Adobe calls font height options, which allow you to precisely scale texts by cap height, x-Height, or ICF if you're working with CJK. And if you say 200 points, guess what? It's 200 point. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, so this is what I want with these characters of type exactly matching the rectangles in the background and this is what I got. And so, I've got some work to do. And so, the first thing I'll do is click on this rectangle with the black arrow tool in order to select it. At which point I can see here in the properties panel that the height, the H value here, is 160 points. Now you might be working in a different unit of measure, it really doesn't matter, but points is the standard for type. And, by the way, if I were to drag this guy down, like so, you can see that it snaps into alignment at a DY, Delta Y value, of 160 points. And so, in other words, the distance between these two rectangles is the same size as the height of each one of the rectangles, and that will become important in just a moment. And so, I'll go ahead and select this type right here, which happens to be point text for what that's worth. And the reason we can see this frame is because I have the bounding box turned on as indicated by the appearance of Hide Bounding Box in the View menu. And that'll just give us some perspective. And so, assuming that your control panel is up on screen, then you can click on the word Character to bring up the character panel, and then select the type size value, or if you prefer font size, and I'll change that value to 160 points. At which point you might expect that this all cap text would exactly fit that 160 point rectangle, but you'd be mistaken. And the reason is, I'll go ahead and move this guy upward a little bit, for just a moment anyway, that the text is sized inside of what's known as an M box. Now, it'd be nice to believe that the bounding box is the same size as the M box, which varies, by the way, from one font design to another. However, that is not the case. Let me show you how the M box really works. I'll go ahead and undo that move and then double click here at the end of this text in order to bring up my blinking insertion marker. And I'll just press the Enter or Return key in order to invoke a line break and I'll enter Heelo There. Well at any rate, it doesn't matter what it says. I'll just go ahead and press the Escape key in order to accept that change, and then I'll bring up the character panel once again, I'll select is letting value, which is the distance between baselines, and I'll change it so it matches the type size, and then I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac. That is the indication of the M box, which as I say, varies from one font to another and is entirely determined by the font's designer. All right, but we don't need any of that. So I'll just go ahead and press Control + Z or Command + Z on the Mac, as many times as it takes to get rid of that second line. And so, here's what's available to you in Illustrator 2021 or later. You can bring up the character panel once again, click on that fly out menu icon in the top right corner, and turn on this command right here, Show Font Height Options. At which point, you'll see this new setting. By default, it's set to M box, which is the way things have worked since the dawn of digital time. And I'm going to change that to cap height, which is going to work very nicely for this all cap text. And then I'll select this font size option right here, which now looks like a C between two baselines, and I'll go ahead and change that value to 160 points and notice that in matches exactly, especially from the tops to the bottoms of exactly horizontal segments, where as curved segments are going to go a little higher and a little lower. All right, let's see how things work with lowercase type. I'll go ahead and select this text object, click on the word Character to bring up that character panel once again, change this option from M box, which is, by the way, fairly meaningless for matching type to objects, and I'll change it to x-Height. In case you're wondering about ICF box, that's going to be for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. None of which I'm using at the moment. So I'll go ahead and switch to x-Height, and I'll select this font size option, which now appears as an X between baselines, and I'll go ahead and change it to 160 points and press the Enter key or the Return key on a Mac, and we once again have an exact match. Where these lowercase characters are concerned, any ascenders are going to go up beyond that rectangle, any desenders are going to drop down. At which point, I'll go ahead and de-select my type by pressing Control + Shift + A, or Command + Shift + A on a Mac. And there you have it, a couple of much better ways to scale type using the new font height options here inside Illustrator 2021 and presumably later. If you're looking forward to next week, we're back inside Camera Raw slash Lightroom where we'll take a look at camera matching profiles. Deke's Techniques each and every week. Keep watching.

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