Design Center Tutorial
Work with area type in Illustrator CS2
Table of Contents
Creating and editing text threads
Text that flows across multiple type objects is called a text thread. In previous versions of Illustrator, this was called linking text boxes and was difficult to work with. Taking a note from its sister application Adobe InDesign®, Illustrator CS2 now makes it possible to easily manage text threads.
An Area Type object always displays two boxes on its path, one located at the upper left of the object, called the in port, and one located at the lower right, referred to as the out port (Figure 1). Text flows into an Area Type object through the in port and exits the object via the out port. The ports themselves are also used to control text threads.
Figure 1: Every Area Type object in Illustrator has an in port and an out port.
To create a new text thread, you must first have an existing text object to work with.
- First, either use the Type tool to drag out an Area Type object, or click any closed vector path with the Type tool to convert the shape to an Area Type object.
- Switch to the Selection tool and select the Area Type object. With the object selected, you’ll see the in and out ports, of which both will be empty (colored white). An empty in port indicates the beginning of the story and an empty out port indicates the end of a story.
- Using the Selection tool, click the Area Type object’s out port and you’ll notice your cursor changes to the place text icon.
- At this point, you can either click an existing closed vector path or you can click and drag on an empty area on the artboard to create a second Area Type object. The two objects are now linked together. You can see that the objects are linked because the out port of the first object and the in port of the second object are filled with a blue arrow. A line connects the two ports so that you can easily identify the direction of a thread when the Area Type objects are selected (Figure 2). To turn this preview off, choose View > Hide Text Threads.
Figure 2: A blue arrow and a connecting line help identify the direction of a text thread.
You can add as many objects to a text thread as you’d like. To remove an object from a text thread, simply select it and press the Delete key on your keyboard. Illustrator automatically updates the thread with the remaining objects for you. To add a new Area Type object in the middle of an existing thread, you can always click the out port (even though it has a blue arrow in it), and drag out a new text object, which will be inserted into the thread.
Because Area Type objects are enclosed areas, there is a finite amount of text that can fit within them. Overset text is what happens when you have an Area Type object that has more text than it can handle and doesn’t have another text object to link to. An object’s out port displays a red plus sign to indicate where overset text exists (Figure 3). When working with objects that contain overset text, you can either edit the text so that there are fewer words, enlarge the Area Type object to allow for more text, or create a thread and link the object with other text objects.
Figure 3: A production artist never wants to see one of these. The plus sign in the out port indicates that there is overset text and it could mean text reflow has occurred.
