CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide part 38 pps

Entering and Editing Artistic Text
Artistic text will serve you best for illustration headlines, callouts, and on any occasion
when you want to create text that has a special effect such as extrusion, an envelope, text on
a path, and so on. To add a line of artistic text to a document, use the Text tool to click an
insertion point, and then type your phrase; alternatively, after clicking an insertion point,
press
CTRL+V to paste any text you have loaded on Windows’ Clipboard. Creating several
lines of artistic text simply involves typing and then pressing
ENTER to put a hard return at
the end of the line; you then continue typing. By default, all artistic text is set in Arial 24
point; later in this chapter you’ll see how to change the default.
Artistic text is also easy to convert to curves so you can modify a character in a word: for
example, Microsoft’s logo has a tick missing in the second “o”. To duplicate this effect (but
not Microsoft’s logo!), you’d begin with artistic text for the company name, press
CTRL+Q
(Arrange | Convert To Curves), and then edit using the Shape tool. Artistic text, as editable
text, can be fine-tuned using the features on the property bar when the text is selected using
either the Pick tool or the Text tool. The options are shown in Figure 12-2.
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FIGURE 12-2 Use the property bar to get artistic text to look exactly the way you want.
Mirroring (horizontal, vertical)
Type of Font (file)
Font List
Font Size
Bold
Italic
Underline
Character Formatting
Text
Alignment
Edit Text

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Mirroring (horizontal and vertical) In addition to creating special effects, the
mirroring buttons are also useful when, for example, you want to print a T-shirt
transfer with your company name. The name needs to be reversed (mirrored
horizontally) to print on the transfer paper, so the un-reversed print on the T-shirt
reads correctly (or at least without the need for a mirror).
●
Type of Font (file) To the left of the font name displayed in the Font list drop-
down box is an icon signifying what file format the font uses: OpenType, Type 1, or
TrueType. This is a nicety when you’re sorting your fonts in Bitstream Font
Navigator or Windows’ Fonts utility in Control Panel.
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Font Name This is the name of the typeface you select. By default, you’re using
Arial 24 point. You change fonts in a new document by selecting text you’ve typed
with the Pick tool and then choosing a different font from the Font list drop-down. If
a font has family members, a right triangle can be seen to the right of the font name
when the drop-down list is extended, and you can choose it by clicking the (flyout)
triangle. You can also perform a speed-search by clicking the current name in the
Font list box and then typing the first few letters of the font you want. The drop-
down list immediately scrolls to the neighborhood of installed fonts, making your
selection a fast and effortless one. Note also that on the Font list drop-down, at the
top (above the divider bar), are the fonts you’ve chosen recently—from previous
documents and even from previous CorelDRAW sessions.
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Font Size Text has traditionally been measured in points; with current digital
typeface technology, the traditional 72.27 points has been rounded off to 72 points to
the inch. Artistic text used as a headline can ideally be anywhere from 24 points
for a flyer headline to 72 points for an impactful newspaper headline to 300 points and
up (there’s no hypothetical limit to how large artistic text can be)—which is over 4
inches in height—for headlines that fairly shout at the reader.

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Bold and Italic These buttons on the property bar are shortcuts to defining a whole
line of text or only selected characters as bold and italic members of the typeface shown
in the Font list box. If a specific font has no family members, CorelDRAW doesn’t
“fake” a bold or italic look, and the buttons are dimmed. If you need an italic treatment
of a font that has no italic family member, a quick fix is to use the Transformation docker
and then to set Skew to about –12º to apply to the artistic text.
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Underline An underline is an effect available for every font you have installed—
you click the button when text is selected and CorelDRAW renders an underline.
You can modify the style of the underline to your choosing by pressing
CTRL+T,
and then on the Character formatting docker choose from the Character Effects |
Underline drop-down. If you don’t see the preset you want, choose Edit from the
list, and then build the underline width and style you need. Underlines are great
for professional documents, particularly legal ones, but an underline isn’t the most
clever way to emphasize a phrase in an advertisement. Use a bold font instead
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or a colored outline or a gradient fill to attract attention artistically. Although
underlines are effects, they’re very real, and if you convert an underlined phrase to
curves (
CTRL+Q), the underline becomes an object.
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Text Alignment This drop-down lets you set how lines of text are aligned relative to
one another. Although justification will serve you best when using long columns of
paragraph text, artistic text takes on a more polished look, too, when you apply, for
example, Center justification to two or three lines. By default, there is no justification for
newly entered artistic text, but for all intents and purposes, this is left-justified text. Full
Justify creates a splendid, professional look for columns of paragraph text, but tends to

generate an awkward look for artistic text, because a line containing only one word with
only a few characters has to take on very wide character spacing. Similarly, Right
justification is not an everyday choice for audiences who read Western languages (from
left to right). Right justification is a “slow read”; hyphenations and line breaks between
words usually look awkward, and this type of justification should be reserved for a page
layout where the right edge of the text needs to align perfectly to the vertical of a graphic
and the left side of the column can be flowing and freeform. Fo rce Justify creates lines
of text whose left and right edges are perfectly vertical, like with Full Justify, but with
an important difference. Force Justify gives equal emphasis to the spacing between
characters; although it can sometimes create unsightly gaps (called rivers) in paragraph
text, it’s usually a good alignment choice for correcting justified lines of text where there
are too few words on a line, and when hyphenation is not used. Force Justify can also be
used as an artistic treatment of paragraph text, as shown in this illustration.
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Full justification
Force justification
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Character Formatting This button will serve the most creative purposes when
you have one or only a few characters selected using the Text tool. You can
underline a single character, change its font type, family member, point size, and
even rotate the selected character(s), all through Character Effects and Character
Shift on the Character formatting docker. See the following section, “Character
Formatting” for more information.
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Edit Text This button displays a text-editing box, which also appears when you
click a piece of text to which is applied an effect such as an envelope or an extrude.
CorelDRAW is designed with text-editing flexibility in mind, so to transform text
using just about any feature—and to allow the text to still be editable—you work in
a proxy box so you don’t have to start over when you make a typographic error.
Here’s a visual example: You’ve chosen a lovely font to express a lovely sentiment

for a card and have extruded the font. In the morning, you find you’ve misspelled
“Happy”. No big deal. You click an insertion point in the text where the fix is needed
by using the Text tool; the Edit Text dialog appears, you enter the additional characters,
and finally click OK. Occasionally, you might need to modify an envelope containing
text if you’re adding a lot of characters, but the Edit Text dialog is your friend in
a jam, and as you’ll see, you can even change the font of selected characters, the
family members, and the point size.
Character Formatting
You’ll often want to change the look of only one or two characters in an artistic text phrase
in your document. Character formatting can be accomplished using:
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The Shape tool in combination with the property bar.
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The Text tool in combination with the Character formatting docker.
As you can see in Figure 12-3, you have some options using the Shape tool to select characters,
but you have a more complete set of options when you highlight a character with the Text
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tool and then click the Character Formatting button on the property bar. For quick and
simple reformatting, it’s the Shape tool, and for extensive reworking of your artistic text, use
the Text tool. You have additional options for lines running under, over, and through selected
characters, and if, for example, you’ve used the Character formatting docker to put a Double
Thin Underline beneath your text, you can remove this underline later using the property bar
while character nodes have been selected using the Shape tool. Character nodes appear black
when selected (as shown in Figure 12-3), and your cursor is a clear indication you’re editing
text with the Shape tool and not an object path node.
Artistic Text and the Shape Tool
The Shape tool can be used to make various changes to the text, including repositioning
individual characters within the artistic text object, changing the horizontal and vertical
spacing of all the text at once, and selecting nonconsecutive characters, so you change their

properties without changing the rest of the text in the object.
Selecting and Moving Characters with the Shape Tool
To select any characters in an artistic text object, select the text object with the Shape tool
(
F10)—the cursor changes to the Shape tool pointer with an A next to it. With the text object
selected in this way, a small, empty box or “control handle” appears at the lower-left corner
of each character, as shown in Figure 12-4.
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FIGURE 12-3 Format and reformat text characters using the Character Formatting box and the
property bar.
Font List
Font Size
Bold
Underline
Italic
Horizontal and Vertical
Character Offset
Angle
Superscript
Subscript
Small Caps
All Caps
To select any character, click its control handle using the Shape tool. To select
nonconsecutive characters, hold
SHIFT (not CTRL as you’d anticipate) while clicking. You
can also marquee-drag around the nodes you want to select with the Shape tool. With the
control handles selected, you can modify the text formatting, fill, outline, and position of
those characters.
To move one or more characters selected with the Shape tool, click-drag one of the
selected control handles—all the selected characters will move together. Unless you’re

striving for a humorous effect, however, it’s usually a good idea to keep the characters you
move horizontally aligned: hold
CTRL while dragging—vertical moves do not accept the
CTRL key for constraining movement.
Moving characters with the Shape tool changes the horizontal- and vertical-shift values
of them, and the new values can be seen in the Character Formatting box (
CTRL+T). Moving
characters with the Shape tool is useful for manually adjusting the position of characters
visually to improve the kerning, the inter-character spacing. Although repositioning character
nodes can create fun, freeform headlines, it’s also useful if you own a “bum font,” a digital
typeface whose poor coding results in certain characters neighboring other characters too
tightly or too loosely. Then again, almost every typeface has poor kerning for the word
“HAWAII”; at the top of the next illustration is the way the characters align as typed. There
is usually too little space between the IIs, and the A and W should tuck into each other, but
do not. At bottom, after 30 seconds with the Shape tool, the word not only has a better
relationship between negative and positive areas, but the word is also shorter (which is
good when design space is cramped).
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FIGURE 12-4 Set character and line spacing, and reposition individual characters with the
Shape tool.
Line-spacing handle
Character
control nodes
Shape tool
pointer for text
Selected nodes
Character-spacing handle
The Shape tool can be nudged after selecting character nodes and nodes along
object paths. Therefore, you can create better headline kerning by first adjusting the

Nudge Distance in Tools | Options | Document | Rulers and then using the keyboard
arrows to create a professionally typeset headline.
Adjusting Spacing with the Shape Tool
When an artistic text object is selected with the Shape tool, two additional handles appear at
the lower-left and lower-right corners of the object, as shown in Figure 12-5. These two
handles modify the line spacing and character spacing for the entire block in one go.
To increase or decrease the word and character spacing, drag the handle at the lower-
right corner of the selected text object right or left with the Shape tool. To increase or
decrease the line spacing (also the before-paragraph spacing), drag the handle at the lower-
left corner of the selected text object down or up with the Shape tool.
All spacing values modified with the Shape tool can be viewed and edited in the Text |
Paragraph Formatting Docker.
Combining and Breaking Apart Artistic Text
You can combine several artistic text objects into a single artistic text object: select all the
artistic text objects with the Pick tool, and then choose Arrange | Combine or press
CTRL+L.
Each text object starts a new paragraph in the new text object. Ordinarily, the Combine
command converts CorelDRAW objects to simplified ones, but text objects retain their
editability as text.
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FIGURE 12-5 Leading (inter-line spacing), kerning (inter-character spacing), and inter-word
spacing can be tuned using the text handles.
The text objects are combined in the order in which they are selected—if you select
several objects in one go by dragging a marquee around them, they will be selected from
front to back. Text objects that do not contain spaces are combined onto a single line. If any
of the selected objects is not a text object, all the text objects will be converted to curves and
combined with the nontext object.
If the text doesn't combine in the order you want or expect, you can reverse the
stacking order of the original text objects by first pressing
CTRL+Z (Edit | Undo)

and then choosing Arrange | Order | Reverse Order.
Artistic text can also be broken apart from several lines of stacked text to individual
lines, all unique objects. To break apart artistic text, choose Arrange | Break Artistic Text, or
press
CTRL+K. With multi-line text objects, the break apart command results in one text
object for each line or paragraph from the original object.
Also, using the break apart command on single-line text objects results in one text object
for each word. As you’d expect, breaking apart single-word text objects results in a new text
object for each character.
Converting Artistic Text to Curves
Many effects can be applied directly to artistic text, but you might want to apply effects that
cannot be applied as a “live” effect to editable text. To achieve the desired effect, the artistic
text objects first need to be converted to curves: choose Arrange | Convert To Curves, or press
CTRL+Q. Text that has been converted to curves is no longer editable with the Text tool and
must be edited with the Shape tool instead, just like any other curve object. As mentioned
earlier, converting text to plain objects with paths and control nodes is a good way to begin
creating logos. The following illustration shows a treatment of artistic text converted to curves.
With a push of a node here and a pull there, the result is a workable party store sign. See
Chapter 11 for the details on how to use the Smudge brush to produce this effect.
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Entering and Editing Paragraph Text
Paragraph text is very much like the frames of text that professionals work with in desktop
publishing (DTP) applications such as CorelVentura and Adobe InDesign; however, in
CorelDRAW you’ll soon see options and features that DTP applications don’t provide.
The largest difference between artistic text and paragraph text is that paragraph text is held
in a container—a frame—so you don’t directly edit, for example, the width of characters in
a paragraph text frame simply by yanking on a bounding box handle with the Pick tool. In
Figure 12-6 at top are duplicate paragraph frames; they’re easy to spot and differentiate
from artistic text because even when not selected, they have a dashed outline around them

signifying the paragraph text frame. The duplicate at top right has been scaled so it’s wider
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FIGURE 12-6 When you edit paragraph text with the Pick tool, you’re only changing the
shape of the frame, not the text itself.
The Pick tool
modifies the
container for
paragraph text.
The Pick tool
directly modifies
artistic text.
than at left: note that the lines of text flow differently, but the characters remain unchanged,
as does the spacing between characters and words. At bottom the same historic American
address has been entered as artistic text, and then at right the bounding box was dragged to
the right using the Pick tool. The words per line don’t rearrange, but what does happen is
that the characters themselves are stretched, which is often unwanted. That’s the biggest
difference between paragraph and artistic text: if text doesn’t have a frame, then you’re
scaling the text.
Working with paragraph text can be a challenge, a little more complex than riding a bike
but a lot less complex than rocket science. However, once you get the hang of it (and the
following sections are your guide), you’ll find paragraph text indispensable for business
designs, and those Tri-Fold and Top Fold page presets you learned about in Chapter 6 will
spring to life and a new purpose. Your brochures will look as slick as can be.
To create a paragraph text object, select the Text tool in the toolbox, and then click-drag
diagonally to create a rectangle into which you'll enter the text. In the next illustration, the
arrow at left shows the click-diagonal drag technique (commonly called a marquee drag),
and at right you see the result. The text inside the paragraph frame is simple a visual prompt,
and it disappears after you’ve added text. A paragraph text frame has resizing, kerning, and
leading handles (artistic text features these as well), discussed later in this chapter. You have
three ways to fill a paragraph text frame with text:

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Type in the frame Manually, it’s probably best to leave spell checking on as you go.
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Paste from the Clipboard You’ll see a dialog before you can paste if you press
CTRL+V or choose Edit | Paste (and Edit | Paste Special). Here you can choose to keep
or discard the formatting of the text on the Clipboard. If your cursor is inserted in a
paragraph text block when you choose Paste Special, the result is a new block of artistic
text, regardless of your cursor’s insertion point. If you want to paste into existing
paragraph text, pressing
CTRL+V—the simple Paste command—does the trick.
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Import a text file Depending on the text file type, you might be prompted to
install a compatibility pack, especially for older MS Word documents. With a
broadband connection, the process takes about 3 minutes, you don’t have to quit
CorelDRAW, and you can paste after the compatibility program is installed. In
contrast, a plain TXT file with no font or paragraph attributes will import perfectly
after you choose a style of import from the Importing/Pasting Text dialog.
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