From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Creating text outlines - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Creating text outlines

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- [Instructor] In an earlier movie, I mentioned that I can't draw very well. But fortunately, we all have a huge library of cool shapes that somebody else drew for us. They're called fonts. And InDesign lets you convert any text from any font into editable paths. In fact, there are two ways to convert text to outlines. Converting a whole frame, or converting just some selected text. Here, let's zoom in on this text frame over here by selecting it and then pressing Command or Control-two. Okay, first, let's convert just a single letter to an outline. I'll double click on this frame to switch to the type tool, and then I'm going to select this character, the letter U. Now, I'll head up to the type menu and I'll come down here and choose Create Outlines. But when I select this, pay attention to the spacing on either side of the letter, okay? See how the spacing got smaller? That's because back when this U was actual text, InDesign could kern it properly with the other letters. It was adjusting the space between the two characters based on the information and the font. But now that this letter has been converted to outlines, InDesign doesn't know how to space it properly because it's not real text anymore. We can see that this is actually an outline by selecting the Direct Selection tool and then clicking on it. See all the bezier points on there? You can also see a little anchor icon attached to it, which means this object is anchored inside the text frame. I'll be talking about anchored objects in a later chapter. Now, it's actually relatively rare that you'd want to convert a single letter or a single word into outlines within a frame. But there are times that you'd want to do it. For example, let's say you want to apply a particular transparency effect just to that letter. Like I'll head up here to the control panel and I'll click this drop shadow button. That puts a big clunky drop shadow just on that one character. The outline text acts like its own object inside the text frame so you can apply an effect to it without affecting the rest of the text in the frame. Okay, let's see the other way of converting text to outline. I'm going to undo this by pressing Command-Z a couple of times. That way it goes back to the way it was. And now let's select the entire frame with a selection tool. Go to the type menu and choose Create Outlines. Now all the texts in that frame is converted to outlines. I'll switch over to the direct selection tool and you can see there's all the points. In this case, the spacing didn't change. It stayed exactly the way it was. People have different reasons for converting text outlines. For example, sometimes you want to change the shape of text. I'm going to deselect this by pressing Command-Shift-A, or Control-Shift-A on Windows. And then with a direct selection tool, I can simply click on here and drag one of the points. You could also use the pen tool to add points, remove points, edit this in all kinds of ways. So, that's interesting. But one of the best reasons to convert text to outlines is to put something inside the path. For example, I'll go back to the selection tool. Go to the File menu and choose Place. Now, I'll just choose one of these images at random and then click Open. You can see that InDesign treats these outlines as a graphic frame and it fills it with the image, which gives these letters a kind of interesting texture. So this is great for a special effect. But I want to be clear here. I do not recommend people converting a lot of their text to outlines. For example, if someone tells you that you should convert everything in your document outlines, don't do it. It's a very bad practice, and almost always unnecessary, even for printing. Plus, you may lose some really important stuff when converting text to outlines. For example, I'm going to scroll over to the right hand page and take a look at this text frame. If you select this whole frame and convert this to outlines, something terrible happens. Sure, all that text was converted to outlines, but we lost something in the process. That line on the left disappeared. And the reason is that line was created with a border feature. That's a feature I'll talk about in a later chapter. But because it was part of the text frame and because borders and rules and background colors disappear when you convert to outlines, you're likely to mess up your design if you convert everything to outlines. So watch out. Now, I should add, that if you do need to make a PDF, where all the text is converted to outlines, there is a feature inside the pre-flight panel in Adobe Acrobat that can do that for you. That is safe. But for the occasional letter or word, something that you want to apply some kind of special effect to in InDesign, well, create outlines is great for that kind of thing.

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