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Hi, I want to talk about formatting blocks
of type. So when I'm talking about that I'm talking about
the formatting that you may be familiar with in
InDesign, Quark Xpress, Microsoft Word.
So instead of dealing with type on paths and
so forth which is helpful but what I want to deal with
is formatting blocks of type.
So just get out the type tool and just draw in
a block and
paste from
the Lorem Ipsum text generator that I
talked about in the other type video.
You'll notice here, first of all select the type
with the black arrow. If I go under the type menu
show hidden characters. Hidden characters are handy
to look at when you're formatting any kind of type just
because they will show you any additional
characters that you might not be aware of. Notice that paragraph return
show up as a backwards P. If I
double click
notice that these paragraphs are starting with a space in front
of them. If I press tab instead
notice that I have a little right arrow. So these things
are effective for being able to see how type is formatted.
Now the next thing I want to talk about is
the problem with having extra characters. So lets say for example
that you're using spaces or tabs to indicate indents
and you've put in extra return to put space between lines of type.
The problem is that when you're
editing this or you present it to somebody
your client, or your editor, and they say "You know what let's
not have
such a big space here for the indents. Or let's get
rid of the space between paragraphs." Well, your kind of stuck.
You either have this tab or you don't. We'll talk
tab stops where you can adjust that but suffice it to say
right now it's somewhat limiting. You can either
have an extra carriage return or you can't.
If you don't sometimes you can tell that there's a paragraph
starting sometimes you can't. So what I want to talk about
is the proper way of doing formatting and that's to get rid of all these extra
things. So i'm getting rid of the extra tabs
extra returns, and by the way
this came up in class. Could you fine change those
paragraph returns. Unfortunately
go under Edit, Find and Replace.
Illustrator for what ever reason has
all kinds of funny characters you can look for
of course, Line Break is not a paragraph return
unfortunately you can't fine change
at least I can't find a way to do it,
fine change a paragraph return. If somebody figures out how to do this
you could just do a fine change on a paragraph return
let me know and there's probably some extra credit in it for you.
At least in version CS 5 here it doesn't
appear to be the case. I checked online and you used to be able to
do this. You used to be able to put in
I think it was backslash+N
but it no longer does that. Let's try
if I put in Force Line Break I think that's like
a shift return
instead. Do a find for that. Notice it doesn't
find it there. So unfortunately you can't
search for two paragraph returns and just reduce it to one
So another good reason why you might not add these
is that your life might become more miserable if you have to remove
them. So I'm going to just manually remove these right now.
So now I have a
real mess. I can't tell where my paragraph returns are except for the fact
that I have invisibles on so I can see them. Remember your
viewing audence isn't going to see these guys. So
how do we make something that works. Well that's where paragraph formatting comes in.
If I highlight these paragraphs
along the top here you'll notice, I think this is called the control bar
they used to call it the options bar, anyway the bar along the top there's a paragraph
button. If I pop that out there's a couple of key things
I could choose. By the way, these are just shortcuts
If I go to window, down to type theres
a lot of these. So characters, command+T paragraph is
command+option+T, tabs are command+shift+T.
So those are kind of nice to remember.
I like the little shortcut, it just pops out and is there for a minute.
So first way you can indicate a paragraph i
typical indents. So if I press the
first line indent a little bit, notice I'm hovering over this
first line indent I get a little break.
What's nice about this is if your editor wants
the indent bigger or smaller you can just go in and make a change to this.
and it adjust those indents.
It only does it for the paragraphs that I have selected.
The other thing that we could do, lets say you don't like indents. Instead
you want to work with space between lines thats kinda where the
whole using a extra carriage return or extra paragraph return comes from.
Well, there's space before and space after. You can choose
to use both. If you use both they'll compound a little bit so I'll
do a little bit of space before and a little bit of space after and
what their doing is kinda sitting on top of each other. A lot of people ask
"Well why do you have both?" I'll show you an example of that in a minute
here when we use subheads and body copy. Right now
we're just use space after on these paragraph returns. Notice that the first line
if you use space before the first line doesn't push down from the top of the box.
Okay, so we put in those values and now really quickly
we're able to create some paragraph formatting
the cool thing about it is, is that spacing isn't being used by
adding extra characters, its just a formatting issue. So if I decide to change
it again I can change it through formatting. You will see why this is handy
in a second. I'm going to make paragraph style. Before
we do that let's deal with some other things. I'm going to go ahead and format
the first paragraph exactly the way that I want it.
Triple click
Looks like it's a triple click
to select the paragraph. With triple click I'm going to come in and
pick a font. By the way, here's another goofy thing. Open
from the font choice here and you don't get a preview.
If you click on the character button and click on font
and you get a preview. Go figure. I'm just going to pick something
straight forward. Palatino.
So we switch it over to Palatino. I'm also going to use
leading. Leading is the space between lines.
When ever you see a parenthesi that means it's the auto leading.
So right now it's auto leading
14.4 pt for 12pt type.
Basically Illustrator is just adding a little
extra for that. I will always look for
when dealing with type I'm always going to look to see that you're setting a
fixed leading amount. That you're using something rather than the auto leading
Why? There's a couple reasons. First of all,
as a designer you should be choosing what the leading value is not the program.
The next thing is, is that leading looks different with different
typefaces. For instance, this is Myriad.
At 12pt. If I highlight this, lets change it
to Adobe Garamond
Here we go.
In Garamond
has a different kind of look to it.
These are the point sizes and they're using the same amount of leading
I think you could easily say in the comparison
that this looks a little looser in its construction. That's just
because of the proportion of the small characters to the
caps. Or the x height is what they're calling this.
The x height to descenders and ascenders
that's different in each font so because of that you're going to have a
relative loosness or tightness that occurs
from fonts even with the same point size same leading value.
So I want you to get in the habit of picking a fixed
leading so that you're making a design choice and so that the type
looks appropriate for
what you're going for. So for instance, if I go in with Myriad here
I would say in general I would loosen this a little bit.
So I'd come in under character and increase
the leading on this a little bit more.
So that that copy now has a little
looser quality, it has a little bit more openness to it.
In terms of typographic color these two lines if you just
blur you vision a little bit, these two blocks of paragraphs now
look very similar even though this is using a different leading value than this.
Anyway, that's my little soapbox on leading.
Coming back to this guy.
We've set some leading, we've set some space after on it.
And we've made a font choice. If I want
to apply this to all of the paragraphs in there
I could remember all of these things and maybe I'd get it right and maybe I wouldn't
but what I'd rather do is create a style. So I'm going
to go under Window, down to Type and choose
Paragraph styles.
Notice that with all the paragraphs I'm making in here it just has this normal
style with a plus. That just means right now it always
starts with Myriad Pro, 12pts etc.
Now I've gone through and I've changed these to a certain amount. I've given the space after
all of them and in some cases I've change the fonts.
All you have to do is format a paragraph the way you want it
to be. So just highlight a little bit of text
in that paragraph. So get that paragraph set up just the way you like it visually
and then come in to paragraph styles and I'm going to make a new style.
It makes this paragraph style 1. If I double click on it
it opens that up. The first thing I'm going to do is change the name
to something like "copy". If I say copy then we're doing with
body copy. It's easy for me to identify. Notice that
all the information is in here. Palatino, Regular, 17 pt leading.
No space before but 7 pt space after.
Press okay. Now that shows up as
copy. Now Illustrator I think has a bug in it.
I can't describe this any other way. InDesign works differently.
Notice that before when this was highlighted it said copy without a plus
now if I clicked anywhere else in the paragraph it says
copy with a plus. This means supposedly
it is using the copy style plus there's some local formatting. Well we know
its not true, it's using exactly what we're seeing inside
of that paragraph style. We haven't changed anything
but we're getting this copy plus. So what I would recommend doing
if you want the next stuff to work is select
all of the paragraphs, and i'm just pressing command+A and when you do that
it selects all the paragraphs that are even not visible, and i'm going
to hold down alt or option, than click on
copy again. When I do that it applies
no paragraph style, it gets rid of these overrides
Illustrator calls them overrides, local format. We want to
override the local formats.
We're getting rid of all of those so now if I highlight any of
the text notice that we don't see a plus appearing.
Big deal. Well heres why
it's nice. Now, I can go in even with this block not even selected.
Imagine I have 8 art boards and they're all using this body copy
and I sit down with somebody and their talking they're like "Well you know that's okay
copy, but instead of having the space between the paragraphs I'd like to use
indents." So you say "great no problem" you come back double click on
your style. Click on
Indents and Spacing. Notice that's where it says 7pt space after
and just put in 0. Instead
i'm going to give it a first line indent. Since its 12pt type
let's give it 12pt first line indent. That's not a hard and fast rule by the way
it's just a starting place. Have a peek and see what happens
okay. Now I can see paragraph
indents. I can still tell where new paragraphs are in fact, even if I
hide show hidden characters, It's very
easy to tell where new paragraphs are. Either way, space before
or space after, or indenting it. It works.
That's one, I was going to talk about using space before and space after
in conjunction. Let's put in a sub head. So i'm going to
press return a sub head would be a single small line
that preceds a block of copy.
So let's say this is for a
brochure. Let's
have a line that says "Hotel
Accommodations" I always misspell accommodations. By the way,
spelling, where can find spelling in here?
I think its under edit.
Yup. Check spelling. It opens up kinda this goofy
spelling checker. And it's going to find all kinds
of problems because it's not looking for latin text and it's encountering lots
of latin text. But that's where you can do it, under Edit, check spelling.
Okay, Hotel Accommodations. We're going to do the same thing we did before
I'm going to come in here and I want to change this so it
looks more like a subhead. So instead of
using Palatino lets use some
maybe Optima is a good one. We'll go to Optima
let's choose extra black. Oh that kinda
looks nice. Let's make it
typically your subheads are little bit bigger in size but this is looking pretty good.
14 might look a little better. Okay.
Then let's do some paragraph formatting on it. So
i'm going to just choose no left indent
because subhead we can tell is
the beginning of the paragraph. We're going to use a little space before here
There we go.
By making these changes
we can seperate this text
Highlight this. Notice
copy now says "hey you have local formatting here" We do because we've made those
changes. I'm going to say "no, I want this to be a new style"
Double click on it. By double clicking it applies that style to it.
Notice it says paragraph style 2, we're going call this
subheads.
Again, it shows what changes we've made.
Notice that funky little plus showing up again. So again,
once you've formatted it appears that
in Illustrator you have to option click
to retag it so that it actually not have any other local
formatting changes applied. Now the cool thing is that I can
go in and make some changes.
I'm going to click away so nothings selected. By the way, let's say you're
like "oh I want to edit copy" If you come over and click
on copy it accidentally applies that style. So I don't want
to happen. Instead I'm going to click away so no type
is selected. Double click on copy. Now let's use, instead of
the first line
indent let's go ahead and
use a space before and you'll use how these work together.
I'm sorry space after. Going to use a little bit of space after
with my body copy. Notice how they work together.
Space after pushes
each line or each paragraph a little bit further
away and when it gets to the Hotel Accommodations
it's using a little bit of space before it's compounded.
The space before of the subhead is being added to
the space after of the body copy so we get a little bit more distance
between subhead and body copy. That's pretty standard
in formatting. The key thing when you're doing subheads is that you want subheads
to be closer to the copy that it represents
than the copy above it.
So we've set up some paragraph styles and the great thing is that we can go
in and change the look of a paragraph
at any point. So I might go in and maybe I wanted
to change some of the character formats. maybe 17pts is too extreme
I switch it down, by the way you can choose something other than what you've got
here. Just put in a value. 15 pt.
Try that out.
Okay. maybe my subhead I actually do want
a little bit of space after this too so
this stands off a little bit. It's kind of a big dialogue box
for these changes but you can monitor them at least with a preview.
Again, we could change font and all of those
things here. So by doing that and applying that
clearing the overrides, option clicking on the
style I can now make those changes at any point and
fix it.