Subtitles of the Movie

Here we're going to have a brief look at the control palette. Now, we will develop this as we move along the tutorial, so I'm not going to go into everything in detail. However, the control palette is one thing that Adobe has improved vastly over the previous versions and there's a lot of new features available to us on it. It's context-sensitive. That means that what we have selected will change what shows here, depending on what we can do with that object. I talked about it a little bit in the previous movie, but I'll just do it again briefly here. At the moment, it's docked at the top. You can pull down this menu here and dock it at the bottom. There it is at the bottom. Come back again, float. There you can float it in the middle of the screen, put it anywhere you want there and let me just go back and dock at top like that. When you select an object, you can see everything becomes live, or most items become live, depending on what it is. There's two dimmed out ones there. Up here is the reference point or proxy button, as it's sometimes called and it tells you what position it's making its references to. Over here, we have the object's position on the X and the Y axis. As I select different objects, you can see that this changes and if I change the reference point, let's say to the top left hand corner, you can see it tells me exactly where it is, 0.5 in over here and across here, on my ruler at 6.3. I go to the lower right. It changes again. Bottom center, lower left, top right, et cetera Select it and it tells me the center point. We have the width and the height of the frame. Select this one. Obviously the width and the height is different and the text here is different again. These are scaling buttons, rotations, skewing and then we get on to a number of other options that are available to us as we move along. Let me come over and select the text here, like this. If I double click in here or triple click, as I actually did, we have a number of other options. With text, you have two option buttons here. One is paragraph and the other is text. Here's where we could choose the font, if we wanted to, or change the point size, the leading, lots of other text options that are available and of course we'll be covering as we move along. However, paragraph options are options which affect not just individually selected text, but the entire paragraph, such as indent, alignment, spacing above and below, bullets and more alignment and columns over here. They're all different. Even if I come over and select this item here, I've got to go back to my selection tool and choose the direct select tool. Come in here, click on it. You'll see that some of these things are dimmed out. That means that those options are not available to us at the moment. One thing it does show you up here is the scale. Notice that it's 44 percent and that's the size, the percentage against what we brought it into the program. If I come over and select it with the regular selection tool, it will always show it 100 percent. With the direct select tool, like this, it will tell me how it's been scaled on the page. So there are so many options in here as we move around this and select different items, whether it's text, graphics, or things we have drawn and we can control most things from the control palette, rather than going up into these menus. Of course, there are some more advanced features that we do have to go into the menus with and of course we will cover those. In the next movie, we're going to take a look at these palettes over here.