Work with area type in Illustrator CS2
Table of Contents
Achieving perfect alignment
As designers, we are extremely particular about the appearance of the art we create. Setting type can present a designer with a variety of challenges because each character of each font is different. Even though a column of text is set to be justified, that doesn’t mean that from a visual perspective, it will appear so. Punctuation and special characters can present optical illusions and make text appear as though it is set incorrectly, although mathematically, it is set correctly. Because of these issues, a designer may struggle to align text so that punctuation marks sit just outside the actual margin of text to ensure a clear line that the human eye can follow.
However, this sort of struggling is no longer necessary because Illustrator has two features that take care of these optical issues. With an Area Type object selected, you can choose Type > Optical Margin Alignment to have Illustrator make sure that margins on both sides of an Area Type object are visually straight from a design perspective (not a mathematical one). Additionally, you can select an Area Type object and choose Window > Type > Paragraph to open the Paragraph palette. Then, choose Roman Hanging Punctuation from the Paragraph palette menu to force all punctuation marks like commas, periods, and quote marks to appear outside the margin of the text at the beginning and end of a line (Figure 4).
Figure 4: The Roman Hanging Punctuation setting makes setting great-looking text almost too easy.
Where to go from here
For more information working with type, check out the following resources:
- Put Illustrator CS2 to work for you, by Total Training
- What’s your type?, by the Adobe Creative Team
- Working with type in Adobe Illustrator CS2 (PDF, )by the experts at Adobe
