Chapter 6. Type Magic

Text on the printed page and all around us in our daily life is a prime means of communicating. And type how text is presented directly affects its message, just as a suit of clothes identifies its wearer. Graphics can grab our attention and perhaps rouse our emotions, but when we really want to find out about a subject, we want to read the text. Text is the stream of characters that fills the text frames in the Adobe Creative Suite 2 applications InDesign CS2, Illustrator CS2, and Photoshop CS2 and are incorporated in the web pages created by GoLive CS2. Each of these applications give you a range of tools for creating, importing, and editing text, manipulating text frames, checking spelling, and so on.

The Creative Suite applications don't just work with text like a word-processing application. They also let you format the text in powerful ways, and add the typographic refinements that can make it compelling. One of the ways they do this is by giving you access to all of the features of fonts, which are one of the building blocks of graphic design.

In this chapter, we'll show you how Adobe has continued a tradition of high-quality type in Adobe Creative Suite 2, begun when Adobe first developed PostScript, a page-description language that is a cornerstone of digital publishing. Here are some of the text and type features we'll cover:

• Tools for choosing and applying fonts. By providing useful information about your fonts, the CS2 applications assist you in preventing problems like duplicate fonts, which can cause unexpected type display or text reflow.

• OpenType. The CS2 applications support all font formats, but they make it possible to use a powerful new font format called OpenType to create the highest-quality typography. The OpenType format can really open up the magic in working with type.

• Tools for setting fine type. Adobe InDesign has pioneered innovations in page-layout features that make it the leader in setting fine type. It offers new ways of composing type, handling text and tables, and creating fancier type effects.

• Many of the sophisticated type features from InDesign have now been incorporated in Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop as well, and we'll tell you when to create type in these applications. You'll also learn how to handle "legacy" type in Illustrator (from earlier versions) and how to save Photoshop type to use it in another application.

In this chapter we'll be focusing on the text and type features of Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop. See "Cascading Style Sheets" in Chapter 8, "Working with Style," for information about working with type and cascading style sheets in GoLive CS2.