SAMS Teach Yourself Adobe® Photoshop® CS2 in 24 Hours [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

The Type Tools

In case you haven't noticed previously, Photoshop's creators tend to include as many ways as they can think of to do things. The Emboss effect in the last hour is a case in point. Working with type is another. There are three ways to control type in Photoshop. When you select the Type tool (the capital

T in the toolbox), the Tool Options bar will display the basic type options: font, size, alignment, and a few other controls. The Type tool options are shown in Figure 17.1. (I had to cut the bar into two pieces so that it would fit on the page.) There are also Character and Paragraph palettes that give you even more control. Let's look first at the Type Options bar.

Starting at the left side of the bar, you'll see the Type Orientation buttona capital

T with two arrows. The arrows indicate horizontal or vertical orientation. Click the button to change the type from horizontal to vertical and back.

After that come menus listing all your available fonts, styles, and font sizes, from 672 points. You can set larger or smaller type by typing the point size into the entry field. Next, you can set the amount of anti-aliasing to apply: none, sharp, crisp, strong, or smooth. Anti-aliasing produces smooth-edged type by partially filling the edge pixels. As a result, the type edges appear to blend into the background. Generally speaking, anti-aliased type looks better, especially if you are working with small type sizes. (Anti-aliasing can also make small type sizes appear more readable when viewed online.) Select from four levels of anti-aliasing to modify the appearance of type online. Crisp makes your type somewhat sharper; Sharp makes it as sharp as possible. Smooth makes it smoother, and Strong makes it look heavier.

The next set of three buttons enables you to select left-, centered-, or right-alignment. The color swatch, which is the same as your current foreground color, lets you set a color for the type. Clicking the swatch opens the Color Picker, just like clicking any other swatch.

The warped

T button with the curved line under it represents one of Photoshop's coolest type tricks. It's called Warp Text, and it gives you access to 15 preset type paths ranging from arcs and flag to fisheye. I'll go into greater detail about this tool later in the hour.

Finally, there's a button called Palettes, which opens the Character and Paragraph palettes; we'll consider these palettes next. But first, let's set some type.

The Character Palette

The Character palette (see Figure 17.2) gives you control over kerning, tracking, and shifting the baseline, in addition to the font, style, color, and size options also found on the toolbar. You can determine your type options with the Character palette before you set the type on the page, or you can use the palette to reformat type you've already entered.

The menus on the Character palette give you access to your installed fonts, font sizes, and styles, just as on the Tool Options bar.

The entry field next to the A\V button controls kerning.

Kerning refers to the amount of space between adjacent letters. Most fonts, in larger sizes, require some kerning to adjust the spaces between letter pairs such as AV and WA. Otherwise, you'll notice a gap. The default setting for kerning is Metrics, which means that Photoshop will apply the font metrics information built into the font. If you decide to override this, you can do so by entering a different kerning amount in the field.

Tracking is similar to kerning, but involves evening out the amount of space between letters in a word or phrase rather than just in a pair. Tracking can be tight (enter negative numbers) or loose (enter positive numbers). Setting 0 in the tracking field means that no tracking is applied.

Leading (pronounced to rhyme with

heading or

bedding ) determines the amount of vertical space between lines of type. If you're setting a single word or one line of type, you won't need to deal with this. As soon as you add a second line, leading becomes important. Because leading is measured from the baseline of a line of text to the baseline of the line above it, the amount of leading has to be greater than the point size of the type to keep the lines from touching or overlapping. (The

baseline is the invisible line on which type is placed.) Photoshop's default for leading is 120%, which is to say, 10-point type gets 12-point leading, and so on up the scale.

You can set a distance from the baseline for subscript and superscript types. Why you'd be using superscripted footnotes in Photoshop, I'm not sure. Using a superscript to correctly set an equation such as Einstein's E=mc² could prove useful, though.

There's a row of buttons at the bottom of the palette for type styles, and menus for language and anti-aliasing. In addition to faux bold and faux italic, you can select all caps, small caps, superscript, subscript, underscore, and strikethrough. The language menu lets you choose fonts with foreign characters and calls the appropriate dictionary when you check spelling. (Yes, there's a spelling checker. You'll learn more about it later in the hour.)

The Paragraph Palette

What Photoshop defines as a paragraph would horrify grammarians. In Photoshop terms, any line followed by a carriage return is a

paragraph . The Paragraph palette sets options that relate to the entire paragraph, such as alignment, justification, and indentation (see Figure 17.3).