From the course: InDesign 2021 Essential Training

Creating text outlines

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- [Instructor] In an earlier movie, I mentioned that I can't draw very well. But fortunately, we all have a huge library of cool shapes that somebody else drew for us. They're called fonts. Now in design lets you convert any text from any font into an editable path. In fact, there are two ways to convert text to outlines. Converting a whole frame or converting just some selected text. Here, let's go ahead and select this text from the exercise file. And I'm going to zoom in to 200% by pressing Command or Control + 2. First let's convert just a single letter to an outline. I'll double click on this text frame to switch to the type tool, and then I'll select this letter R. Now let's head to the type menu and choose create outlines. But when I select it, watch the spacing around that letter R, see how it changed a little bit, the space between the R and the letters around it got smaller. That's because back when this R was actual text, InDesign could curnutt properly with the other letters, it was adjusting the space between the characters based on information in the font. But now that this letter has been converted to outlines, InDesign doesn't know how to space it properly, because it's not real text anymore. Now we can see that this is actually an outline by selecting the direct selection tool in the tool panel, and then clicking once on that character, see all the little beezer A points on there. You can also see a little anchor icon attached to it, which means that this object is anchored inside the frame. I'll be talking about anchored objects in the later chapter. Now, it's relatively rare that you'd want to convert a single letter or even a single word into outlines within a text frame. But there are times that you'd want to do it. For example, let's say you want to apply a particular transparency effect only to that letter. To do that, you could head up to the control panel and say click on the little drop shadow button that puts a big clunky drop shadow just on that one character. The outline text acts kind of like its own object inside this text frame, so that you can apply an effect to it without affecting the rest of the text and the frame. Okay, let's see the other way of converting text to outlines. I'm going to undo this by pressing Command + Z or Control + Z a few times, that gets it back to the way it was. Now, let's select the entire frame with a selection tool. Because we have the whole frame selected, when we go to the type menu and choose create outlines, the spacing won't change. That's because all the text in the frame has been converted to outlines. I'll switch over to the direct selection tool, and you can see all the beezer points on those paths. Now people have different reasons for converting text to outlines, for example, sometimes you might want to change the shape of some text, I'm going to deselect this by pressing Command + Shift + A or Ctrl + Shift + A. And then with the direct selection tool, let's drag some of these points around, you can see you can make some really strange effects. You could also use the pen tool to add points or move points and edit this in all kinds of ways. So that's interesting, but really one of the best reasons to convert text to outlines is to put something inside those outlines. For example, let's go back and choose the selection tool, then head up to the file menu and choose place. I'm going to grab one of these images, just by random and then click the open button. You can see that InDesign treats these outlines as a graphic frame, and it fills it with the image which gives these letters that kind of interesting texture. So this is great for a special effect. But I want to be clear here, I do not recommend people converting a lot of their text to outlines. For example, if someone tells you that you should convert everything in your document to outlines, you probably should not do it. It's a very bad practice and almost always unnecessary. Plus, you may lose some really important stuff when converting text to outlines. For example, I'm going to scroll over to the right here, and let's convert one of these frames to outlines. I'll select it with a selection tool, go to the type menu and choose create outlines. As soon as I did that, something terrible happened. Sure all the text was converted to outlines, but we lost a lot in the process. For example, that line along the left edge disappeared. And the reason is that that line was created with a border feature. That's a feature I'll talk about in a later chapter. But because it was part of the text, and because borders and rules and background colors all disappear when you convert to outlines, you're likely to completely mess up your design, if you convert everything to outlines. You really have to be careful with this feature. But for the occasional letter or word, something that you want to apply some kind of special effect to well create outlines is great for that kind of thing.

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