The Type Palette

Last week we were discussing the type palette. We went over the top portion of the Character palette that contains the font size and some other details. Please go over to last weeks column if you have not yet read it. If you have, then let's continue.

We are now looking at part C of the Character palette. Here you have 4 different windows. The upper left-hand one is the height designation. You can increase or decrease the overall height of the text you have highlighted on the canvas. To the right of that is the width designation. Now, I don't find a lot of use for this myself. Usually, I use the transform image feature. Nevertheless, you may find a use for it. You can designate the width and/or height by percentage. Pretty keen I must say.

The bottom left box is the baseline shift box. You can raise a letter or number like a superscript or subscript. Handy if you are doing some algebra in your free time. This feature will save you some time someday. Saves you the trouble of dealing with two layers etc...

One final feature of the Character palette is the color box. Here you double click and a color picker comes up. You can change the color of your text, either by changing this with no highlight (which will change all the text on a layer), or you can highlight part of the text and change just that highlighted part. This is a great feature, that saves a lot of time and headaches.

Now let's move down to the Paragraph palette. Everything you see here should be familiar to you if you have ever used a word processor. You have buttons for alignment, either left, center or right. Then you have justify boxes that let you do some swift page layout time stuff. There are 4 of those justify boxes, which are left, center, right, all. At the bottom you have some features that let you indent parts of a paragraph. You can indent first line, last line, the whole paragraph or you can provide some margin spacing attributes both left and right. Finally there is the hyphenation button. The will hyphenate words that go onto the next line.

So that concludes our overview of the type palettes. I personally love this new feature. It is a vast improvement over PS 5 features that had us editing text in a pop-up window, rather than on the canvas. I like the ability to do my work in real-time. Saves me the trouble of opening and closing that text window a whole slew of times. Well, that's it for this week. Stop by jlswebsource.com if you are still hankerin' for some Photoshop tips. Talk at you in seven days.