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Adobe Illustrator CS
Format type with character and paragraph styles For more than a decade, Adobe® Illustrator® has set the standard for typographical excellence. Now, Illustrator CS introduces character and paragraph styles to help you ensure consistent text formatting. Whether you’re formatting entire paragraphs or shorter type segments, character and paragraph styles save you time by letting you to apply formatting attributes with a single click. Follow along and learn how to put character and paragraph styles to work for you.
Once you’ve created a character style, it’s easy to format additional text. Simply select the text you want to format, and click the style in the Character Styles palette.
2. Create a paragraph style.
1. Create a character style. Enter new text or select existing text that you wish to format. Choose Window > Type > Character, and use the Character palette to format your text as desired. Then with the text selected, choose Window > Type > Character Styles, and click the Create New Style button at the bottom of the palette.
Enter new text or select existing text that you wish to format. Use the Character and Paragraph palettes to format your text as desired. (By default, the Paragraph palette is docked with the Character palette; if it isn’t showing, choose Window > Type > Paragraph to display it.) Then with the text selected, choose Window > Type > Paragraph Styles, and click the Create New Style button at the bottom of the palette.
Tutorial
ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR CS 2 Format type with character and paragraph styles
A paragraph style includes both character and paragraph formatting attributes, so if you have text that requires both it’s best to create a paragraph style instead of a character style. Once you’ve created a paragraph style, it’s easy to format additional paragraphs. Either highlight the text to be formatted or place your cursor anywhere in the text block, and click the style in the Paragraph Styles palette.
In this example, the line breaks at the end of the paragraph were somewhat distracting. To correct this, we highlighted the text, and selected Adobe Every-line Composer from the Paragraph palette menu. The Every-line Composer is the default text composer in Illustrator and automatically produces text with even spacing, consistent line lengths, and minimal hyphenation. (Try switching between the Every-line Composer and the Single-line Composer to see the difference.) Now the paragraph looks better, but the paragraph style used to format the body text has an override. We liked the changes, so we redefined the style by selecting the body text and choosing Redefine Paragraph Style from the Paragraph palette menu.
3. Experiment with style overrides. When you change the formatting of text that has a style applied to it, a small plus sign appears next to the style name. This indicates that the style has an override. An override is any formatting that doesn’t match the attributes defined by that style. If you notice an override, you can either create a new style, leave the override in place, or redefine the style. Alternately, you can revert the text to the original style settings by selecting the text and Alt-clicking (Windows) or Option-clicking (Mac OS) the style name.
Tutorial
ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR CS 3 Format type with character and paragraph styles
4. Edit your character and paragraph styles.
5. Saving and sharing your new styles.
In the last step you created an override and then redefined the style. You can also make changes to a style directly through the styles palettes. To edit an existing style, simply double-click the style name. On the left side of the dialog box, select the category of attributes you want to modify.
Save your current Illustrator document, and then open a new Illustrator document. In the Character Styles palette or the Paragraph Styles palette, choose Load Character Styles or Load Paragraph Styles from the palette menu. Double-click the Illustrator document that contains the styles you want to import.
One advantage of using styles is that when you edit a style, all text instances that use the style are updated to reflect the new style settings. If you’re not sure about making a permanent change to your existing style, create a duplicate style by selecting the style and choosing Duplicate Character Style (or Duplicate Paragraph Style) from the palette menu.
Loading styles is a great feature if you have multiple designers working on a series of pieces. Just send the Illustrator document that contains the styles to everyone via email, or place the document on a server. When everyone uses the same text styles, you can be confident that the designs will remain cohesive. Note: Illustrator CS introduces advanced unicodebased type technology that makes it easier than ever to produce polished typography with new paragraph and character styles, optical kerning, and full OpenType font support. Please note that this new technology is not compatible with previous versions of Illustrator. However, new options have been created to help you minimize disruptions when working with legacy files. Upon opening legacy files, you may either leave text as is or you may choose to edit it, in which case you must update the text (potentially causing the type to reflow). Options for saving files in legacy file formats are now found in the Export dialog box (where you can choose among previous Illustrator or .EPS formats). Upon export, text will be broken up into point type (by default) or converted to outlines, as determined by the preferences in the Document Setup dialog box.
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