Have you ever needed to send something to a printer and it didn’t print out correctly? It’s most likely to that the printer didn’t have the exact font that you had. There are ways to embed fonts into PDFs but it adds size to the document.

I prefer to convert the text into shapes. I must warn you. If you convert text into shapes it’s a one way trip. You can’t convert shapes back into text.

You might be wondering if there are any other reasons why you’d want to convert Font text into shapes. Logo design is one of the main reason’s to convert a font you already have and tweak it to fit the project.

Here’s an example of converting Text into shapes:

Obviously W’s and g’s don’t look like this out of the box. By converting the word “Winning” and the thin black rectangles into shapes and then merging them. You are able to get something that looks completely different then the regular font.

Now that you know WHY you would want to convert text into shapes with Adobe Illustrator, let’s look at “how to convert text into shapes with Adobe Illustrator”.

First you want to make sure that the “Text” layer is meat balled. See red box.

Next you need to run the command “Create Outlines”. This is found under the “Type” menu. You can also use the keyboard shortcut “Shift+Ctrl+O”.

Once you do that. Go back to the layers dock. You will see something interesting. Each letter has become it’s own object. All the letters will be added to a new group.

Notice the “g” on the left hand side is now a compound path. You can now edit the letter even further if you wanted/had to.

It’ isn’t that hard to do the conversion but I find the “Create Outlines” for what ever reason doesn’t jump out at my in the drop down list. Now that your word is turned into shapes you can go in and do anything you can do with shapes which is a lot!

Hope you enjoyed the article on “How to convert text into shapes with Adobe Illustrator”.

I was following along with the instructor on using Adobe Illustrator. I went to go use the Scale tool and nothing seemed to happen. I tried selecting the layer, I tried meatballing the Parent layer. I tried meatballing the layer that the circle object was actually drawn. Nothing seemed to work.

There is one more thing I could have done  which I didn’t do at the the time. It’s to get out the trusty old “black” arrow. Select the item you want to scale. Then scale the item!

Again here’s the procedure on how to use the scale tool:

1. Draw an object
2. Use the black tool to select ALL of the object
3. Click on the Scale tool (S)
4. Check where the “Scale point” is. By default it’s set to the middle of the object. If that’s not where you want to scale the object from please move it to the spot by clicking on it and moving it to the new spot
5. Move the scale tool and now it will behave like you expected.

Other notes/tips

• Holding “Alt” allow you to bring up the dialog to copy the object and make it smaller/bigger
• Holding “Shift makes the object increase in the same ration in both X & Y coordinates.

I am starting some more training. This time I decided I wanted to learn Adobe Illustrator. One of the cool things I learned right away is how to create a guide from any object in illustrator. One of the most used guide setups that you will use in illustrator is a guide going straight down the middle both vertically and horizontally.

The easiest way to do this is to:

select the “Rectangular Grid Tool”.

Drag the tool from the top left of the page to the bottom right. While still holding the left mouse button you will to need to use the arrow keys to add/remove lines in both the vertical and horizontal positions.

Right adds vertical lines. Left arrow removes them.

Up arrow adds horizontal lines. Down arrow removes them. Once you are done it should look something like this:

You can now change this drawing into guides that you can use in your drawing. To convert the image go to the View menu. Go all the way down to “Guides” and then select “Make Guides”. The shortcut as you can see is “Ctrl+5”.

Once you have made the guides most people like to lock them. To do that go back to “View”. Re-select “Guides” and this time Click “Lock Guides”.