Chapter 9: Understanding FreeHand Typography

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One of FreeHand's strongest selling points is its type handling capabilities. With just a few preparations, you can work through the most text-heavy jobs in no time at all. Beyond general typesetting, FreeHand offers numerous effective graphic possibilities.

Import Text or Set It in FreeHand?

As you know, workflow can take many directions. What's logical to one artist isn't to another, but both can get the job done. That said, my philosophy on setting body text was shaped in the days of hot type, cold type, photo type, and press type. I really don't miss those days all that much. Today you have two basic choices: use a word processor, or type directly in your page layout or drawing program. With a headline or a couple lines of text, there's no question — just type it in FreeHand, but what if there's more text than that?

Word-processing programs

For large bodies of text, you are best off setting the text in a word-processing program. When I bought my first computer, I purchased Microsoft Word at the same time. I've been using it ever since, but many programs, such as WordPerfect, do the job just as well. A word-processing program is equipped to take text as fast as you can input it, and some have interactive spell checking and grammar checking, too.

You must remember to save the files as Rich Text Format (RTF) or ASCII (plain text), however, or you won't be able to import them into FreeHand. Remember also that while inputting text any tabs you set will be ignored as far as its locations go. The tabs will be in place, but measurements fly out the window. Other than placing a tab in Word, there's no reason to worry about the tab's placement, because that information will be lost when the file gets to FreeHand.

Word processing in FreeHand

If the text is less than five or six paragraphs, setting it in FreeHand is simple enough. Just click the Text tool (type a T if you're in any other tool) and the cursor turns into a text input icon. You can click anywhere on the page and begin typing, or you can drag a text block of a specific size. Letting go of the mouse places the insertion point of the text appropriately to the paragraph alignment setting that is currently in use (in other words, if paragraphs are set to be centered, the cursor blinks in the center of the first line of the text block). Conversely, you can click the text icon on the page, or click/drag a box, and adjust the width and height of the box, as well as its location on the page in the Text inspector. Any of the above situations enable you to begin setting the text.

The default font on a Mac is 24-point Times. However, I most often use 12-point Helvetica Condensed in my work. I chose that font as part of my custom default page, so it's my default font. If you type a few characters and decide that you want a different font, you must select the entire block of copy before you change the font. If no text is selected and you change a font (and its attributes), text from that point on is in the new font, but previous text remains unchanged. Alternatively, if you select a text block with the Pointer tool, you can change attributes to all of the text in the block through the Text inspector or Text toolbar.

Cross-Reference 

Refer to Chapter 5 for a discussion on custom pages.

The Text Editor

Where you type in FreeHand depends on how you like to work and the amount of text you will be inputting. If it's not a lot of text, you can type directly on the page, but if you want to see just the text without waiting for the page to redraw, go to Text ® Editor Shift+Control+E (Shift+Command +E). (You can also hold down the Alt (Option) key and double-click the text block.) In Windows, you can also right-click a text block with the Text tool and choose Editor from the menu. A small window appears that contains only the text in the currently selected text block. You have the option of viewing the text as it appears in the document (see Figure 9-1), or click the button to see everything in 12-point black text. When you click the Show Invisibles button, spaces, tabs, paragraphs, discretionary hyphens, and line breaks appear as gray marks to aid you in typesetting. You can apply any text attributes you want through the means discussed above while in the Text Editor. When you're done typing, just click the OK button; if you want to see the effects of your typing without closing the Text Editor window, click the Apply button.

click to expand
Figure 9-1: The Text Editor box, showing such invisibles as spaces and end of line marks

Checking your spelling

FreeHand is just like a word-processing program when it comes to performing a spelling check. Just place the Text cursor in a text block and choose Text ® Spelling. You can click the Setup button in the Spelling dialog box () to open the FreeHand Preferences window and turn on or off several conditions. When the Spelling Checker finds a word that is not in the dictionary, you can add it to your custom dictionary by clicking Add, and the Exactly as Typed, or All Lowercase buttons.

Text hyphenation

In just about every block of justified text, you'll end up having to break a word to create a line break and avoid unsightly gaps in the text. Too many hyphenated words in a row also look pretty bad, and sometimes you just don't want any hyphens at all — whether it's in a particular word, or an entire paragraph. All of these hyphenation situations are controlled from the Paragraph tab of the Text inspector. Click the Hyphenate option, to allow hyphenation in the selected text, and click the ellipsis (...) button to open the Edit Hyphenation window. Here you can select the dictionary to use from the dictionaries that are installed with FreeHand (the English version allows a choice of English or British). You can also set limits on consecutive hyphens, and choose to Skip Capitalized Words and/or Inhibit Hyphens In Selection.

Discretionary hyphens

At times, you must break a word that doesn't fall in a location that FreeHand hyphenates automatically, or FreeHand might not place the hyphen where you want it. In those instances, you can insert a discretionary hyphen. If you simply place a hyphen where you want it and press Return, you get the break you want, but if the text reflows for any reason, the hyphen and paragraph break remain intact, and louse up your typography. Placement of a discretionary hyphen (Text ® Special Characters ® Discretionary Hyphen), or Control+hyphen (Command+hyphen) puts the hyphen where you want it — not where the program figures it should go. As an added benefit, when text reflows, causing the word to be placed in the middle of a line where a hyphen is not needed, the discretionary hyphen disappears, leaving the word unbroken in the text.

Smart quotes

Smart quotes change the vertical quote marks found in general word processing to "curly quotes" found in professional typesetting. In Preferences, you can select the style of quote marks you want to use. Choices include the standard American style of quotes, plus several European language styles. When you need to use straight quote marks (for feet, inches, minutes, and so on), hold down the Control key as you type a single quote or press Shift+Control to get straight double-quotation marks.

Searching for text

It happens. You type "warm fuzzy feeling" throughout the instruction manual because "fuzzy worm feeling" just doesn't sound right to you. Then you find out that you're making a package for a stuffed worm... now what? Just select Edit ® Find & Replace ® Text. When the dialog box opens, you can type in words you are searching for, and words to replace them. You can also find and replace several text features, as shown in Figure 9-2. You can choose to replace all instances at once by clicking Change All, or find and replace individual instances by using the Find Next and Change buttons. To make the search more specific, options are available for Whole Word, Match Case, or Show Selection. (You can click any or all of those buttons.) When you want to select (or select and change) all text that happens to be a particular font, use the Find Graphics button in the Main menu, and choose Font from the drop-down menu.


Figure 9-2: This Find Text dialog box looks for paragraph marks in the selected text.



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Macromedia Studio MX Bible
Macromedia Studio MX Bible
ISBN: 0764525239
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 491

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