Adobe Fireworks CS3 Tutorials
Working with Text / Formatting Text pt. 2
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Fireworks CS3 / Working with Text / Formatting Text pt. 2)
Continuing my review of how to modify text here in the Properties Inspector, we get to the Text Orientation setting, which is right next to the leading setting here. That's the Set Text Orientation button right there. Press that button and you get a variety of options: Horizontal text, left to right, Horizontal text, right to left. You can see that I've reversed my text, as well as Vertical Options: Vertical left to right, and Vertical right to left. It's probably not the best example here, but you get the idea. Let's set this back to Horizontal, Left to right, and bring this back in the canvas view area. Let's also modify my text block so you can see all that text. Next we get to Text Alignments. We have Left alignment, Center alignment, Right alignment, and this one here is the Justified alignment where you have both left and right are smooth, and then there's another option here, which is called the Stretch Alignment. I'll go ahead and extend this out and you'll see that with the Stretch Alignment, I'll go ahead and stretch the text so it fills that text box completely. So if I modify the width of the text block it changes the text within that block there. Filters I'll be talking about a little bit later in the tutorial, so that now brings us to the Width, Height and Location settings. Here is the width and the height of the text block there, so notice if I do 300 it brings it out to 300 pixels. Let me go ahead and change my alignment to Left Align, and now let's move that to 400 and you can see how that stretches out the width of my text block. Likewise I can set the height. Let's change it from 224 to 300, and now back down to 100, again stretching the text, and manipulating the text so it fits within that width and height setting. X and Y represents the location of the upper left hand corner of the text block, so notice if I choose X equals 50, in the X direction it means that I'm 50 pixels from the edge. Let's set that to 100 and you'll see that move over to the right, like so. Notice that I can also move it with my Pointer tool, and notice the X-Y coordinates change as I move that text block. Next is the Paragraph Indent tool. You can see a little arrow there next to the paragraph, and I can modify the indent of the first sentence in the paragraph because I have a return between the All and the Aspects, I get an indent here on the first line and the third line. Let's bring that back down to zero. Underneath the Paragraph Indent is the Horizontal Scale, so that I can scale this horizontally, again distorting the text there in a positive direction. There's 50 percent, 96 percent, all the way up to 300 percent. Let's go ahead and set this back to 100 percent. Also notice you can type in a number, 100 there. Press the Enter key. It brings it back to the way I had it. Next is I have Space Preceding Paragraph right here. I have two paragraphs. Let me go ahead and add another return here, or Enter so you can see these paragraphs a little bit easier. But Space Preceding paragraph is this setting. Notice that it's adding space in front of that second paragraph. It's in essence increasing the leading between the paragraphs. And then below that I have Space After Paragraph. In this instance they appear to do the same thing, but if I include additional paragraphs here in my text block, now we'll see some differences between the two. Notice that in the first case; let's go ahead and bring this back to zero, and that one to zero, so I've got my cursor right here in the second paragraph. Let's go ahead and move this text block up a little bit too, and if I move my cursor right there to put the insertion point right before the "a" in aspects, and I increase the Space Preceding paragraph, notice that I get more space in front of this paragraph. If I modify the setting Space After Paragraph, I move the distance between this second paragraph and the third paragraph, therefore adding space after that paragraph. So this is handy to adjust the spacing between paragraphs. Next we get to the Baseline Shift setting, right here. This is a little bit tricky in the Properties Inspector in that sometimes you won't see this drop-down menu. Notice if I click off my text block, click inside of it, notice that I have my bounding rectangle, and I have all the other text properties, but I don't have the baseline shift, instead, it's replaced by this Stroke Color here. However, if I click to select some text within the paragraph, now I have the baseline shift drop-down menu. This Baseline Shift setting determines how closely text sits above or below it's natural baseline. If there is no Baseline Shift, the text sits on the baseline, so you can use this Baseline Shift to create superscript and subscript characters as well as other effects. Notice that I can go positive with my baseline effect to move the baseline up, or negative to move it below the baseline. Finally, we have our Anti-Alias settings. These are very important because oftentimes you're using text that's quite small and you'll want to adjust your Anti-Aliasing. The options are: No Anti-Alias, Crisp, Strong, Smooth; so there's the strong anti-alias. Here's the smooth anti-alias. And you will notice differences, especially again when you have smaller text. This is a very important setting, because remember that most Web sites are composed principally of text and you'll want to sometimes use graphic text. Notice that No Anti-alias looks pretty bad. Sometimes the Crisp or Strong Anti-alias will make small text a little bit blurry and hard to read. Let me now move on to the next movie and demonstrate how to free text from the restrictions of rectangular text blocks by demonstrating how to attach text to a path.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Fireworks CS3 |
| Author: | James Gonzalez |
| SKU: | 33836 |
| ISBN: | 1-934743-42-9 |
| Release Date: | 2008-01-25 |
| Duration: | 8.5 hrs / 93 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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