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Using the Type Tool

In a drawing or desktop publishing program, the type tool typically serves two purposes: You can create text with the tool or you can edit existing text by highlighting characters and either replacing them or applying formatting commands. The following steps assume that you're creating text for the first time in your image (more about adding to existing text later).

STEPS: Creating Text in Photoshop

Select the type tool by clicking its icon in the toolbox or pressing T. Photoshop activates the type tool, displays the I-beam cursor in the image window, and displays type controls in the Options bar. You can access additional formatting options by displaying the Character and Paragraph palettes, shown in Figure 15-5.

Figure 15-5: Photoshop provides a full complement of text creation and formatting options, which you access from the Options bar, Character palette, and Paragraph palette.

Select the font, type size, and other formatting attributes from the Options bar and palettes. The upcoming sections explain your options.

Click or drag in the image window. If you click, Photoshop places the first character you type at the location of the blinking insertion marker, just as when you type in a word-processing program. Adobe calls this creating point text. Each line of type operates as an independent entity. Press Enter (Win) or Return (Mac) to begin a new line of text.

Alternatively, you can create paragraph text by dragging with the type tool to draw a frame — called a bounding box — to hold the text. Now your text flows within the frame, wrapping to the next line automatically when you reach the edge of the bounding box. If you create your text this way, you can apply standard paragraph-formatting attributes, such as justification, paragraph spacing, and so on. In other words, everything works pretty much like it does in every other program in which you create text in a frame. Pressing Enter (Win) or Return (Mac) starts a new paragraph in the bounding box.

Type your text. If you mess up, press Backspace (Win) or Delete (Mac) to delete the character to the left of the insertion marker. On the PC, pressing Delete wipes out the character to the right of the insertion marker.

Edit the text, if necessary. To alter the character formatting, select the characters you want to change by dragging over them or using the selection shortcuts listed in the upcoming Table 15-1. Then choose the new formatting attributes from the Options bar, Character palette, or Paragraph palette. If you don't select any text, paragraph formatting affects all text in the bounding box. Otherwise, only the selected paragraph responds to your commands.

You can also choose the Check Spelling command to spell-check your text, as well as use the Find and Replace Text feature to hunt for words in large chunks of text; more on that later in the chapter.

Click the OK (check-mark) button on the right end of the Options bar to commit the text. Don't worry — "committing the text" simply takes you out of the text-editing mode. As long as you don't convert the text to a regular image layer, work path, or shape, you can edit it at any time.

When you create the first bit of type in an image, Photoshop creates a new layer to hold the text. After you commit the type, clicking or dragging with the type tool has one of two outcomes. If Photoshop finds any text near the spot where you click or drag, it assumes that you want to edit that text and, therefore, selects the text layer and puts the type tool into edit mode. For paragraph text, the paragraph is selected as well. If no text is in the vicinity of the spot you click, the program decides that you must want to create a brand-new text layer, and responds accordingly. You can force Photoshop to take this second route by Shift-clicking or Shift-dragging with the type tool, which comes in handy if you want to create one block of text on top of another.

Creating vertical type

The vertical type tool is entirely dedicated to creating vertically oriented text. To get this tool, press T (or Shift+T) when the regular type tool is active. In truth, the vertical type tool is nothing more than the standard type tool lifted from the Japanese version of Photoshop. As shown in the first example of Figure 15-6, it creates vertical columns of type that read right to left, as in Japan. If you want to make columns of type that read left to right, you have to create each column as an independent text block.

Figure 15-6: By default, vertical type reads right to left, as shown in the first example. If you deselect the Standard Vertical Roman Alignment option in the Character palette menu, your characters appear like those on the right.

After you click in the image, you have access to the Standard Vertical Roman Alignment command in the Character palette menu. (If the palette isn't open, click the display/hide palettes button at the right end of the Options bar. It's labeled in Chapter 12, to rotate the text layer.

You also can choose Layer Type Horizontal and Layer Type Vertical to change vertically oriented type to horizontally oriented type, and vice versa. But why bother with those commands when you can just click the change text orientation button on the far left side of the Options bar (labeled in Figure 15-5)?

Creating and manipulating text in a frame

By dragging in your image with the type tool, you create paragraph text. As you drag, Photoshop draws a frame to hold your text, as shown in Figure 15-7. Photoshop calls this frame a bounding box. If you want to create a text frame that's a specific size, Alt-click (Win) or Option-click (Mac) with the type tool instead of dragging. Photoshop displays the Paragraph Text Size dialog box, in which you can specify the width and height of the box. Press Enter or Return, and Photoshop creates the bounding box, placing the top-left corner of the box at the spot you clicked.

Figure 15-7: Drag the box handles to transform the frame alone or the frame and text together.

The bounding box looks just like the one that appears when you choose Edit Free Transform, and some of its functions are the same:

Drag a corner handle to resize the box. Shift-drag to retain the original proportions of the box. The text reflows to fit the new dimensions of the box.

Ctrl-drag (Win) or z -drag (Mac) a corner handle to scale the text and box together. Ctrl+Shift-drag (z -Shift-drag on the Mac) to scale proportionally. To scale text alone, use the character formatting controls in the Options bar or in the Character palette (explained next). Either way, you can scale up or down as much as you want without degrading the text quality, thanks to the vector orientation of the type tool.

To rotate both box and text, move the cursor outside the box and drag, just as you do when transforming selections, crop boundaries, and layers. Shift-drag to rotate in 15-degree increments. The rotation occurs respective to the origin point, which you can relocate by dragging, as usual.

Using the bounding-box approach to type, however, has more benefits than being able to use the transformation techniques I just described. You also can apply all sorts of paragraph-formatting options to control how the text flows within the bounding box, as described in the upcoming section "Applying paragraph formatting."

If you ever decide that you'd like to work with your text as regular text instead of paragraph text, cancel out of the text-editing mode by clicking the OK or Cancel button in the Options bar. Then select the text layer and choose Layer Type Convert to Point Text. Photoshop splits the paragraph text into individual lines. To go back to paragraph text, select the text layer and choose Layer Type Convert to Paragraph Text.

Selecting and editing text

Before you can modify a single character of type, you have to select it. You can select all text on a text layer by simply double-clicking the layer thumbnail in the Layers palette. (This automatically switches you to the type tool as well.) You can select individual characters by dragging over them with the type tool, as in any word-processing program. You also have access to a range of keyboard tricks, listed in Table 15-1.

After selecting type, you can replace it by entering new text from the keyboard. You can likewise cut, copy, or paste text by pressing the standard keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl/z +X, C, and V) or by choosing commands from the Edit menu. You can undo a text modification by pressing Ctrl+Z (z -Z on the Mac) or choosing Edit Undo. However, if you type a few characters and then choose Undo, you wipe out all the new characters, not just the most recently typed one. If things go terribly wrong, press Escape or click the Cancel button in the Options bar to cancel out of the current type operation.

Applying character formatting

The Options bar gives you ready access to the collection of formatting controls shown in Figure 15-8. The Character palette and its palette menu, also shown in the figure, offer some of these same controls plus a few additional options. If you use Adobe InDesign, the palette should look familiar to you — with a few exceptions, it's a virtual twin of the InDesign Character palette.

Figure 15-8: Photoshop provides many character-formatting controls in the Options bar and the Character palette, including increased support for OpenType features.

To open the palette and its partner, the Paragraph palette, click the display/hide palettes button in the Options bar. Alternatively, you can choose Window Character or press Ctrl+T (z -T on the Mac) when in the text-editing mode.

The next several sections explain the character-formatting options. All apply to both paragraph and regular text. You can specify formatting before you type or reformat existing type by selecting it first.

Font

Select the typeface and type style you want to use from the Font and Style pop-up menus. Rather than offering lowest-common-denominator Bold and Italic check boxes (as was the case back in Photoshop 4), Photoshop is smart enough to present a full list of designer-style options. For example, whereas Times is limited to Bold and Italic, the Helvetica family may yield such stylistic variations as Oblique, Light, Black, Condensed, Inserat, and Ultra Compressed.

The Character palette menu contains a bunch of additional style options, which you can see in Figure 15-8. Click these options in the menu to toggle them on and off. A check mark next to the style name means that it's active.

Many of the style options in the palette menu are available also in the row of buttons near the bottom of the palette. They include the following (in order from left to right on the palette itself and top to bottom in the palette menu):

Faux Bold and Faux Italic enable you to apply bold and italic effects to the letters when the font designer doesn't include them as a type style. Use these options only if the Style pop-up menu doesn't offer bold and italic settings. You get better looking type by applying the font designer's own bold and italic versions of the characters.

Choose All Caps and Small Caps to convert the case of the type. You can't convert capital letters to Small Caps if you created those capitals by pressing Shift or Caps Lock on the keyboard.

Superscript and Subscript shrink the selected characters and move them above or below the text baseline, as you might want to do when typing mathematical equations. If Superscript and Subscript don't position characters as you want them, use the Baseline option to control them, as I explain in the upcoming section "Baseline."

Underline Left and Underline Right apply to vertical type only and enable you to add a line to the left or right of the selected characters, respectively. When you work with horizontal type, the option changes to Underline and does just what its name implies. Strikethrough draws a line that slices right through the middle of your letters.

NoteIt's a bit confusing when working with vertical type to have two Underline options available in the menu — left and right — but only one Underline button on the palette itself. Activating the button turns on whichever type of underlining you used last; it's probably safer to ignore the Underline button when using vertical text and just use the palette menu.

One of the more useful OpenType options is Ligatures. A ligature is a special character that produces a stylized version of a pair of characters, such as a and e, tying the two characters together with no space between, like so: . The rest of the OpenType options are specialized, and you're more likely to use them in a layout program such as Adobe InDesign. As with the Asian fonts, if you're going to be working with them, you probably already know what they do. If you're still curious, check the manual for a description of each option. The expanded OpenType support is an improvement that most Photoshop users won't need, but it gives you some great new options nonetheless.

Size

You can measure type in Photoshop in points, pixels, or millimeters. To make your selection, press Ctrl+K and then Ctrl+5 (z -K and then z -5 on the Mac) to open the Units and Rulers panel of the Preferences dialog box. (You must exit the text mode to do so.) Select the unit you want to use from the Type pop-up menu.

If the resolution of your image is 72 ppi, points and pixels are equal. There are 72 points in an inch, so 72 ppi means only 1 pixel per point. If the resolution is higher, however, a single point may include many pixels. The moral is to select the point option when you want to scale text according to image resolution; select pixels when you want to map text to an exact number of pixels in an image. (If you prefer, you can use millimeters instead of points; 1 millimeter equals 0.039 inch, which means 25.64 mm equals 72 points.)

Leading

Also called line spacing, leading is the vertical distance between the baseline of one line of type and the baseline of the next line of type, as illustrated in Figure 15-10. You set leading using the Leading pop-up menu in the Character palette, labeled in Figure 15-8. Again, either select one of the menu options or double-click the current value, type a new value, and press Enter or Return. Leading is measured in the unit you select from the Type pop-up menu in the Preferences dialog box.

Figure 15-10: Leading is the distance between any two baselines in a single paragraph of text. Here, the type size is 120 pixels and the leading is 150 pixels.

If you choose the Auto setting, Photoshop automatically applies a leading equal to 120 percent of the type size. The 120-percent value isn't set in stone, however. To change the value, open the Paragraph palette menu and choose Justification to display the Justification dialog box. Enter the value you want to use in the Auto Leading option box and press Enter or Return.

Kerning

Technically, kern is the predetermined amount of space that surrounds each character of type and separates it from its immediate neighbors. (Some type-heads also call it side bearing.) But as is so frequently the case with our molten magma of a language, kern has found new popularity in recent years as a verb. So if a friend says, "Let's kern!" don't reach for your rowing oars. Get psyched to adjust the amount of room between characters of type. (Yes, there are people who love to kern and, yes, it is sad.) You establish kerning using the Kerning pop-up menu in the Character palette, labeled earlier in Figure 15-8. Select 0 to use the amount of side bearing indicated by the specifications in the font file on your hard drive.

Some character combinations, however, don't look right when subjected to the default bearing. The spacing that separates a T and an h doesn't look so good when you scrap the h and insert an r. Therefore, the character combination T and r is a special-needs pair, a typographic marriage that requires kern counseling. If you select Metrics from the Kerning pop-up menu, Photoshop digs further into the font specifications and pulls out a list of special-needs letter pairs. Then it applies a prescribed amount of spacing compensation, as illustrated by the second line in Figure 15-11.

Figure 15-11: Examples of three of the kerning options available in Photoshop. I've added wedges to track the ever-decreasing space between the difficult pairs Fo and Tr.

Still, there may be times when the prescribed kerning isn't to your liking. To establish your own kerning, click between two badly spaced characters of type. Then select any value other than 0 from the Kerning pop-up menu. Or double-click the current kerning value, type a value (in whole numbers from –1000 to 1000), and press Enter or Return. Enter a negative value to shift the letters closer together. Enter a positive value to kern them farther apart. The last line in Figure 15-11 shows examples of my tighter manual kerns.

Incidentally, the Kerning and Tracking values (explained shortly) are measured in 1/1000 em, where an em (or em space) is the width of the letter m in the current font at the current size. This may sound weird, but it's actually very helpful. Working in ems ensures that your character spacing automatically updates to accommodate changes in font and type size.

Fractional Widths and System Layout

If kerning gives you fits, try turning off Fractional Widths, found in the Character palette menu. (Click the option name to toggle the feature on and off.) When type gets very small, the spacing between letters may vary by fractions of a single pixel. Photoshop has to split the difference in favor of one pixel or the other, and 50 percent of the time the visual effect is wrong. Better to turn the feature off and avoid the problem entirely. The top two text blocks in Figure 15-12 show the effects of Fractional Widths both on screen and in printed form.

Figure 15-12: Examples of the Fractional Widths and System Layout options as they appear on screen (signified by the World Wide Web icon) and in printed form (signified by the printer icon).

However, turning off Fractional Widths isn't always a complete solution, as seen in the middle two examples of Figure 15-12. A better choice when using small type for on-screen display is to turn on the System Layout option in the Character palette menu. Doing so turns off antialiasing — in fact, choosing System Layout when you have an active text layer makes Photoshop automatically perform three operations visible in the History palette, the first of them being Anti Alias None. As the bottom two examples in Figure 15-12 show, this is the best option for small on-screen type and a particularly good choice when you need to match the type used in on-screen interface elements.

Tracking

The Tracking value, which you set using the pop-up menu to the right of the Kerning pop-up (see Figure 15-8), is almost identical to Kerning. It affects character spacing, as measured in em spaces. It even reacts to the same keyboard shortcuts. The only differences are that you can apply Tracking to multiple characters at a time, and Photoshop permits you to apply a Tracking value on top of either automatic (as in Metrics or Optical) or manual kerning. Tracking is usually applied to body text, such as paragraphs, whereas kerning is typically used in single lines of text, such as headlines.

Horizontal and vertical scaling

The Size pop-up menu scales text proportionally. But using the two scaling options labeled back in Figure 15-8, you can scale the width and height of letters individually. A value of 100 percent equals no change to the width and height. Enter a value larger than 100 percent to enlarge the character or lower than 100 percent to shrink it.

Photoshop applies horizontal and vertical scaling with respect to the baseline. If you're creating vertical type, the Vertical value affects the width of the column of letters and the Horizontal value changes the height of each character.

Baseline

The Baseline value, which you set using the bottom-left option box in the Character palette, raises or lowers selected text with respect to the baseline. In type parlance, this is called baseline shift. Raising type results in a superscript. Lowering type results in a subscript. An example of each appears in Figure 15-13.

Figure 15-13: Baseline shift frequently finds its way into the worlds of math and science. The labels show the Baseline values.

You can also raise type to create a built fraction. Select the number before the slash (the numerator) and enter a positive value into the Baseline option box. Reduce the type size of the number after the slash (the denominator) but leave the Baseline value set to 0. That's all I did to get the built fraction at the bottom of Figure 15-13.

Color

Click the Color swatch in the Options bar or in the Character palette to display the Color Picker dialog box. You can apply color on a per-character basis. The color you select affects the next character you type and selected text.

Antialiasing

The Antialias pop-up menu, found both in the Character palette and in the Options bar (refer back to Figure 15-8), offers five choices. Whichever option you choose, the entire layer gets the effect. You can't apply antialiasing to individual characters on a layer, as you can other character formatting options.

Choose None from the pop-up menu to turn off antialiasing (softening) and give characters hard, choppy edges, which is good for very small type. Sharp applies a slight amount of antialiasing, creating sharp contrast. Crisp is similar to Sharp but a little bit softer. If you notice jagged edges, try applying the Smooth setting. If antialiasing seems to rob the text of its weight, you can thicken it up a bit with the Strong setting. Sharp, Crisp, Strong, and Smooth produce more dramatic effects at small type sizes, as shown in Figure 15-14.

Figure 15-14: The results of the five antialias settings, available from the pop-up menu in the Character palette and in the Options bar.

Applying paragraph formatting

Photoshop offers a full complement of paragraph-formatting options, including justification, alignment, hyphenation, line spacing, indent, and even first-line indent. With the exception of the alignment options, all these controls appear only in the Paragraph palette and affect text that you create inside a bounding box. (See the section "Creating and manipulating text in a frame," earlier in this chapter, for information about this method of adding text.)

Figure 15-15 provides a field guide to the Paragraph palette and also shows the palette menu, which offers additional choices related to paragraph formatting.

Figure 15-15: You can control the flow of text created in a bounding box by using the options in the Paragraph palette.

Alignment

The alignment options, found both in the Paragraph palette and in the Options bar, let you control how lines of type align with each other. Assuming that you're using the horizontal type tool, Photoshop lets you left align, center, or right align text. The lines on the alignment buttons indicate what each option does, and they change depending on whether you're formatting vertical or horizontal type.

If you create bounding-box text, Photoshop aligns text with respect to the boundaries of the box. For example, if you draw a bounding box with the right alignment option selected, the text cursor appears at the right edge of the box and moves to the left as you type. For vertical type, the right align and left align options align text to the bottom and top of the bounding box, respectively. You must choose a different alignment option to relocate the cursor; you can't simply click at another spot in the bounding box.

When you create point text — that is, by simply clicking in the image window instead of drawing a bounding box — the alignment occurs with respect to the first spot you click and affects all lines on the current text layer.

Roman Hanging Punctuation

One additional alignment option controls the alignment of punctuation marks. You can choose to have punctuation marks fall outside the bounding box so that the first and last characters in all lines of type are letters or numbers. This setup can create a cleaner looking block of text. Choose Roman Hanging Punctuation from the Paragraph palette menu to toggle the option on and off.

Justification

The justification options adjust text so that it stretches from one edge of the bounding box to another. The different options, labeled in Figure 15-16, affect the way Photoshop deals with the last line in a paragraph.

Figure 15-16: The justification options let you control how Photoshop adjusts your text when justifying it.

Assuming that you're using the horizontal type tool, choose left justify to align the line to the left edge of the box; right justify to align to the right edge; and center to put the line smack dab between the left and right edges. With force justify, Photoshop adjusts the spacing of the last line of text so that it, too, fills the entire width of the bounding box. This option typically produces ugly results, especially with very short lines, because you wind up with huge gullies between words. However, if you want to space a word evenly across an area of your image, you can use force justify to your advantage. Drag the bounding box to match the size of the area you want to cover, type the word, and then choose the force justify option. If you later change the size of the bounding box, the text shifts accordingly.

You can further control how Photoshop justifies text by using the spacing options in the Justification dialog box, also shown in Figure 15-16. To open the dialog box, choose Justification from the Paragraph palette menu. You can adjust the amount of space allowed between words and characters, and you can specify whether you want to alter the width of glyphs — a fancy word meaning the individual characters in a font. Here's what you need to know:

The values reflect a percentage of default spacing. The default word spacing is 100 percent, which gives you a normal space character between words. You can increase word spacing to 1000 percent of the norm or reduce it to 0 percent.

The default letter spacing is 0 percent, which means no space between characters. The maximum letter spacing value is 500 percent; the minimum is –100 percent.

For glyphs, the default value is 100 percent, which leaves the characters at their original width. You can stretch the characters to 200 percent of their original width or squeeze them to 50 percent.

Enter your ideal value for each option in the Desired box. Whenever possible, Photoshop uses these values. The Minimum and Maximum options tell Photoshop how much it can alter the spacing or character width when justifying text. If you wind up with text that's crammed too tightly into the bounding box, raise the Minimum values. Similarly, if the text looks too far apart, lower the Maximum values. Enter negative values to set a value lower than 0 percent.

As for that Auto Leading option at the bottom of the Justification dialog box, it determines the amount of leading used when you select Auto from the Leading pop-up menu in the Character palette. For information on additional paragraph spacing controls, keep reading.

Indents and paragraph spacing

The five option boxes in the Paragraph palette control the amount of space between individual paragraphs in a bounding box and between the text and the edges of the bounding box. Photoshop's indent options work the same as their counterparts in just about every program on the planet. But just to cover all bases, here's the drill:

Enter values in the top two option boxes to indent the entire paragraph from the left edge or right edge of the box.

To indent only the first line of the paragraph, enter a value into the first-line indent option box, which sits all alone on the second row of option boxes. Enter a positive value to shove the first line to the right; enter a negative value to push it leftward, so that it extends beyond the left edge of the other lines in the paragraph.

Use the bottom option boxes to increase the space before a paragraph (left box) and after a paragraph (right box).

Hyphenation

In most cases, you probably won't be entering text that requires hyphenation to an image. I mean, if you're entering that much text, you're better off doing it in your page-layout program and then importing the image into the layout.

But nevertheless, Photoshop offers the Hyphenate check box in the Paragraph palette. When you select this option, the program automatically hyphenates your text using the limits set in the Hyphenation dialog box, shown in Figure 15-17. Choose Hyphenation from the Paragraph palette menu to display the dialog box.

Figure 15-17: If you ever want to hyphenate text, set the hyphenation controls here.

This dialog box, like several others related to text formatting, comes straight from Adobe InDesign and Illustrator. The controls work as follows:

Enter a value in the Words Longer Than option box to specify the number of characters required before Photoshop can hyphenate a word.

Use the After First and Before Last options to control the minimum number of characters before a hyphen and after a hyphen, respectively.

Enter a number in the Hyphen Limit option box to tell Photoshop how many consecutive lines can contain hyphens.

Finally, specify how far from the edge of the bounding box Photoshop can place a hyphen by entering a value in the Hyphenation Zone box.

Turn off the Hyphenate Capitalized Words check box if you want Photoshop to keep its mitts off words that start with an uppercase letter.

Line breaks and composition methods

When you create paragraph text that includes several lines, you may not like the way that Photoshop breaks text from line to line. You may be able to improve the situation by changing the equation that Photoshop uses to determine where lines break.

If you choose Adobe Every-line Composer from the Paragraph palette, the program evaluates the lines of text as a group and figures out the best place to break lines. In doing so, Photoshop takes into account the Hyphenation and Justification settings. Typically, this option results in more evenly spaced text and fewer hyphens.

Adobe Single-line Composer takes a line-by-line approach to your text, using a few basic rules to determine the best spot to break a line. The program first attempts to fit all words on the line by adjusting word spacing, opting for reduced spacing over expanded spacing where possible. If the spacing adjustments don't do the trick, Photoshop hyphenates the last word on the line and breaks the line after the hyphen.

As I've mentioned before, these options may not come into play very often because most people don't create long blocks of text in Photoshop. If you want to control line breaks for a few lines of text, you can just create your text using the regular, text-at-a-point method instead of putting the text in a bounding box. Then you can just press Enter (Win) or Return (Mac) at the spot where you want the line to break, adding a hyphen to the end of the line if needed.

Checking your spelling

Located under the Edit menu, the Check Spelling command compares the words in your document with the words in Photoshop's built-in dictionary. If you've typed a word not found in the dictionary, Photoshop brings this to your attention by displaying the Check Spelling dialog box, shown in Figure 15-18.

Figure 15-18: The Check Spelling dialog box offers helpful suggestions for replacing words it doesn't recognize, which oddly enough includes the word "Photoshop" in addition to the word "Deke."

The questionable word appears in the Not in Dictionary option box, and Photoshop offers you its favorite replacement word in the Change To option box. Other choices can be found in the Suggestions list. If you have indeed made an error but none of Photoshop's suggested words are correct, you can type the correct word in the Change To option box. After you have the appropriate replacement word in the Change To option box, click Change. To also change all future instances of the misspelled word, click Change All. If the highlighted word is correct but simply isn't in Photoshop's vocabulary, you can click Ignore to tell it to ignore the word, click Ignore All to tell it to ignore that and all other instances of the word, or click Add to add the word to the dictionary. After you finish making corrections, click Done to exit the dialog box.

If you're in the text-editing mode — there's an insertion marker in your text — Photoshop performs the spell-check on only the currently active layer, and on only the text that follows the placement of the insertion marker. In other words, if you want to check the entire text layer, make sure the insertion marker is at the beginning of the text block. Better yet, you can check spelling on all text layers at once. Just make sure that no active insertion marker appears in any text layer when you choose Edit Check Spelling, and make sure the Check All Layers check box is activated in the Check Spelling dialog box.

Finding and replacing text

In the unlikely event that you find yourself entering huge chunks of text in Photoshop, you can choose Edit Find and Replace Text to display the dialog box shown in Figure 15-19. As you may have guessed, this dialog box lets you hunt for specific words in your text and replace them if you so desire.

Figure 15-19: With the Find and Replace Text dialog box, making global changes in your text is easy.

If you've ever used a similar command in a word-processing program, there are no big surprises here. Enter the word you're looking for in the Find What option box. If you want to replace that word with another, type the new word in the Change To option box. The Find Next button locates the next instance of your word relative to the placement of the insertion marker; Change replaces the word; Change All replaces all instances of the word, and Change/Find replaces the current instance and highlights the next. The remaining options are common in Find/Replace commands found in word processors. The one quirky thing about Photoshop's version of the command is that if you start your search in the middle of a text block, Photoshop doesn't wrap around when it reaches the end of the text and start looking at the beginning. That's the main use for the Forward option; leave it on and Photoshop searches forward from the text insertion marker; turn it off and Photoshop looks backwards.

Fitting type on a path

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Photoshop's new text on a path capability is how easy it is to use. Instead of adding a new path text tool, Photoshop lets you use the regular type tool to create path text. You don't even need to use a modifier key. And instead of having to create specific paths on which to place your text, you can toss text of any font, size, or formatting onto any path in your image. The following steps show you how to create text on a path.

STEPS: Creating Text on a Path

Draw a path in your image. Press P to select the pen tool and click to set a few points to form a path in your image. Any open path will do. If you give it a couple of smooth curves using the Bzier handles discussed in Chapter 8, you'll provide a better line for the type. You can add text to any path you draw, but hard edges cause harsh character jumps, which usually is not what you're after.

Add text to the path. Press T to select the type tool and hover your cursor over the path you just drew. Your cursor changes from the normal I-beam to one with a little diagonal line crossing through the bottom of it. Click once to make the path active, and then type to your heart's content.

Format your text to taste. From this point on, any formatting changes behave just as they do when working with regular text, as shown in Figure 15-20. You can adjust the size of characters, increase the tracking to spread them out over the course of the path, or even alter the baseline for a specific character or word. Manual kerning comes in handy here, because Photoshop's Optical and Metrics options have a hard time deciding what looks right on a path.

Figure 15-20: A simple swirl of text on a path can become a lot more when used in conjunction with the traditional text-formatting options available in Photoshop.

Press A to select the arrow tool. Hover over a path with text on it until you get an I-beam cursor with a black arrow protruding from one side. This means you can now use the tool to slide the text around on your path. If you accidentally entered your text upside down, drag the text all the way to the end of the path and continue dragging to pull the text back up to the correct side. You can also use the arrow tool to move the path around your image. To do so, move the cursor away from the path until you once again see the standard arrow tool cursor. Then click and drag to reposition the text and path in unison.

As if all this weren't exciting enough, there's more. You can also add text inside a closed path, as the following steps explain.

STEPS: Adding Text inside a Path

With the Paths button selected in the Options bar, draw a shape. Press U (or Shift+U) to select the desired shape tool and click the Paths button in the Options bar. Drag to draw a shape in the image. A basic circle or square will work fine, but feel free to draw a custom shape if you're feeling more adventurous. For my part, I drew a fish using the custom shape tool, as you can see in Figure 15-21. Keep in mind that the smoother the lines on the shape, the better the text spacing will be on your path.

Figure 15-21: You can situate text at a number of different areas on a shape in Photoshop CS.

Select the type tool and position your cursor at the center of the shape. As you hover, the cursor should look like an I-beam with parentheses around it. Click once and begin to type your text. Notice that the text appears inside the shape, like the text inside my fish in Figure 15-21. In effect, the shape functions as a bounding box for the text. When you've finished entering text, click the OK button in the Options bar.

Choose Window Paths to bring up the Paths palette. You should see the path you created with the shape tool, as well as an identical path that Photoshop created when you entered the text. This is just Photoshop's way of keeping track of how text has been entered on a path. Click the top Work Path item.

Click somewhere else in the shape with the type tool. Or Shift-click if necessary to force Photoshop to create a new text layer. Then enter some new text. In Figure 15-21, I added more text around the border of my fish shape.