Choose Fonts and Characters


Choose Fonts and Characters

In Chapter 9, you ll explore how to assign formatting to text. By default, the last font you selected is the font used next time you type. To select a new font for selected type or for text you are about to type, choose Type Font. Illustrator s list of fonts is cool enough to demonstrate how each font looks, so if you don t have a specific font in mind, you can browse through the options. Some fonts also have boldface versions, italic versions, or both ”as shown in Figure 8-5.

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Figure 8-5: Selecting a boldface font

You can also use the Type Size menu to select a font size for selected type or for text you are about to type.

Because you are likely to have dozens if not hundreds of fonts installed on your computer, Illustrator provides some tools for quickly finding a font in the Find Font dialog box. Select Type Find Font to display this dialog box and use it to find or replace fonts in your document. If you want to replace a font in your document with another one in your document, choose Document in the Replace with Font From drop-down list. But if you want to access all the fonts on your system, choose System from the drop-down list, as shown in Figure 8-6.

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Figure 8-6: Viewing a full range of available fonts to replace an existing font

Many characters in font sets are available from your computer s keyboard. But, interestingly, most of them are not. In the remainder of this chapter, you ll learn to view, select, and insert additional characters that are useful but not immediately accessible from your keyboard.

Insert Glyphs

Glyph is a term that encompasses both normal characters (such as A through Z, 1, 2, 3 , and so on) as well as non-character symbols such as , , , and so on. Each glyph in traditional font sets has a defined three-digit number associated with it. For instance, you can quickly insert the Spanish ± character by entering OPTION-164 ( ALT-164 ) on your keyboard.

Illustrator makes it much easier to find these glyphs ”so you don t need to memorize keystroke combinations of character values. Just choose Type Glyphs to display the Glyphs palette. The glyphs associated with your character set will display in an easy-to-use character map. Double-click on any glyph to insert it at the insertion point in your text, as shown in Figure 8-7.

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Figure 8-7: Inserting a glyph

Most typeface sets include hundreds of glyphs in addition to standard characters. Some sets of fonts, such as Symbols, Wingdings, and Webdings, include sets of frequently used symbols. For handy reference, the entire set of popular Webdings symbols is displayed in Figure 8-8.

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Figure 8-8: The Webdings symbol set has frequently used symbols.

New fonts that utilize OpenType technology have not hundreds but thousands of alternate glyphs. You ll explore those fonts next.

Work with OpenType

One of the more dramatic improvements in Illustrator CS is the ability to utilize OpenType fonts. These font sets include as many as thousands of glyphs, including characters and symbols.

In many cases, this additional character capacity is used to create multilingual font types. These multilingual fonts allow you, for example, to design a brochure with text in Korean, English, Dutch, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Russian without changing font .

Tip  

How much does it add to the aesthetic structure of a multilingual document to use the same font for Chinese, English, and Russian characters? Certainly, very few readers will look closely at the typeface of languages they don't read. And font differences between characters as disparate as English and Korean, Chinese, or Japanese tend to overshadow similarities imbued by using the same font for all content. All this is true. But it is still the case that when they display multilingual content in a unified font, documents do ”on one level or another ”take on a more cohesive and coherent look. And we can expect that, as the world continues to shrink and multilingual documents become even more prevalent , typeface designers will work to develop style attributes that translate from one character set to another.

Beyond providing multilingual font support, OpenType font sets often provide alternate glyph options. For example, you might want to use one uppercase M in a font set at the beginning of paragraphs, another at the beginning of sentences, and a third version for capitalized words not at the beginning of a paragraph or sentence . Or you might take advantage of OpenType alternate glyphs to choose from a set of options for symbols such as , @, or . OpenType fonts also offer a vast array of non-character glyphs.

Create Multilingual Documents with  OpenType Fonts

If you create or import (copy and paste)

type in multiple languages, you can use an OpenType font to assign uniform font characteristics to all your text. Or if you are typing on a western keyboard, you can quickly and (relatively) easily insert some Korean or Cyrillic characters.

In either scenario, you can take advantage of multilingual OpenType font sets. To apply a multilingual font to selected text, simply select text (from many language character sets if you wish) and apply a multilingual OpenType font. Figure 8-9 shows a single font being applied to text content in English, Korean, and Portuguese.

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Figure 8-9: Consistency in appearance can be maintained even in multilingual documents by assigning the same OpenType font to all text.

To (relatively) quickly insert characters from different language character sets, choose Type Glyphs from the menu. Scroll down the Glyphs palette and find your character, as shown in Figure 8-10.

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Figure 8-10: Inserting a glyph from the Kozuka Minchu Pro font set

Use Alternate Glyphs

OpenType font sets often include many variations for standard (and non-standard) characters. In addition to the example at the beginning of the section (using many versions of an uppercase M ), you can also access other sets of alternative characters such as fractions, scientific notation, or superscript characters.

To access these sets of glyphs, choose Type Glyphs from the menu. In the Glyphs palette, use the Show menu to narrow down the set of characters that is displayed. If you have a character selected, you can use the Show menu to display only alternatives to that selected character, as shown in Figure 8-11. Double-click on a glyph to insert it at the insertion point in a selected text box.

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Figure 8-11: Choosing between alternative options for the @ symbol
Tip  

If the Glyphs palette is displaying characters for a different font set than the one you want, you can choose the font you wish to display from the Font drop-down list at the bottom of the Glyphs palette.




How to Do Everything with Illustrator CS
How to Do Everything with Adobe Illustrator CS
ISBN: 0072230924
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 175
Authors: David Karlins

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