Subtitles of the Movie

So now that we know how to make our Narration Captions and our Dialog Balloons, I want to talk a little bit about refining what goes inside them, namely the text. Now most really good professional fonts that you're going to pay for in places like Comicraft, are going to be very well constructed and they're probably going to be pretty much usable right out of the box without too much tweaking from you. There are, however, a couple nice tweaks that you can do here in Illustrator that I find to be very useful for creating just sort of a custom look that's a little bit more - you can choose. Now, of course, if you're using really bad fonts that are something that you got for free somewhere well, then yeah, these are really going to come in handy then. First thing we want to do is we want to look at the Character Palette and understand how we read the Character Palette and also where do we find the Character Palette. If we go to Window, Type, Character. That's what we want to open right there. And you can see here we have the Font Name. We also have the Font Style, so we have Regular, Italic, Bold Italic - depends on what types of variations the font family has. We have our Text Size and then we have our Leading. Now, by default, our leading is set to 120 percent of whatever this value is here. So, right now that would be 7.2 points and you can tell that this is set on Auto because it's within these parentheses. Now, the thing about that is, is what it's effectively doing is it's saying the space between each of these lines is 20 percent of the actual height of the letters themselves, so that's what this little diagram here is saying. It's saying the space between these lines is 7.2 points, which effectively means we get 1 point, 2 point dead space between lines. Now if that's not enough, if things are feeling cramped up you can always increase that and what that would look like is if we just bump that up you can see we can increase the space between those lines but we also end up with the dreaded red box of doom here which we don't want. So let's just go ahead and set it back to Auto. Next thing here is the Kerning. Now, kerning is the space between individual letters and the best way for me to explain that to you is to say - let's see if we can't find one, OK - so the space between this Y and this C, maybe that's not kerned very well in the font so let me go ahead and just reduce that, something really drastic so you can see it, like negative 100. Alright, so now you can see the space here is much bigger than the space here. It only affects the space between those two letters and in order to change the space, like say between this H and this R, I can increase the kerning on that one to, say, something like a positive 100 and now you can see the space between the H and the R is much wider. You can manually go through and fiddle with this stuff all you want but that's not really appropriate for what we're doing here. I'm going to grab the Eyedropper Tool and I'm just simply going to click like so on this other text and it's going to just Copy and Paste that information right back in. Oh, it didn't kill the kerning. Let's go ahead and set those back manually. There we go. I have to remember which ones I did. Now, the last option here is your Tracking and the tracking, as you can see here with this little Icon, is the space between all letters. Now if you have this set to Auto then this will not work for you. The two things are going to fight with one another, so if you want this set to something, you know, set that to zero, alright and then now you can increase the tracking. See how that's basically increasing the space between each letter, all of them, as well as the dead spaces as well. I don't find that to be particularly useful so I don't use it very often but we're just going to go ahead and reset that back to Auto. Now, down here we have the ability to Scale our text Horizontally and Vertically. We have the ability to do a Baseline Shift and a Baseline Shift would be something like we grab this N here and we're just going to boost it up a bit, maybe it's out of place or whatever and we don't want it to be that way, but for right now I'm just going to move that back. And we have the ability to Rotate our text, we have the ability to create Underlines and Strikethroughs and the Language here is just basically for hyphenation and stuff like that. Now, once we're done with that we can go over to the Paragraph Palette and the Paragraph Palette, our primary concern here is we want our text to be centered, that's normal. We also want to turn Hyphenate on. However, if we go to this little black fly-out there's a couple options that I want you to turn on. The first is Roman Hanging Punctuation. And what Roman Hanging Punctuation does is it takes that centered quality that we have with the paragraph and instead of calculating the punctuation into that centering it actually centers on the text alone and ignores the punctuation. It just lets it hang past the edge. And in that way you end up with something that looks a little bit more natural in my estimation. I think that this just looks a little bit kind of funky having this whole word being pushed over because of this sort of just a couple triple dots. That's called an ellipsis, by the way. That's the name of that three period thing, which is kind of a fancy word for three periods, but ellipsis. Anyway, I don't like that being pushed over so enabling the Roman Hanging Punctuation takes care of that problem. The other option here that I find to be somewhat helpful sometimes is Adobe Every Line Composer. And by default we're using the Adobe Single Line Composer, so I'm just going to switch over and you're going to see a very, very slight change. What it's doing now is instead of calculating the optimal space between these letters and these words for each individual line it's calculating the entire paragraph and it's trying to find the optimal spacing for the entire paragraph. I just find that to be a little bit of a nicer way of doing things. Again, it's very, very subtle. Now, the last thing that you can do here on really, really bad type is if it doesn't have good kerning built into it, instead of using Auto go ahead and activate Optical and what that'll do is it'll optically calculate what the best kerning is based on Adobe's own algorithms and sometimes that can look better. It can really look better on bad fonts. But in this particular font I don't know that it's that much of an improvement. However, you will notice that between these two balloons there is a difference between them in how they read and how they look. Let me zoom out a bit. So this, to me, just looks a little bit more readable, a little bit tighter. This to me looks a little bit less polished. And, again, it's very, very subtle stuff but sometimes that little tiny bit of a difference is the difference between professional and amateur.