Point Type has no frame or shape that holds it. Now that you know how to identify the two kinds of Type objects, you can understand how to scale them and get the results you expect. It works just like InDesign, and different icons in the in or out ports indicate functionality (Figure 4). These ports are used with Area Text to help manage 'threads' of text, or text that is linked from one frame to another. It’s really the only way to differentiate a Point Type object from an Area Type object. The trick is, you have to pay attention to the ports (Figure 3) - those are the boxes I mentioned above. However, when you have the Bounding Box option turned on (View > Show Bounding Box), and you use the Selection tool to select your text object, Point Type and Area Type appear nearly identical when selected (Figure 2). (Those boxes are called ports, and I’ll talk about them in detail in a moment.) The text within the Area Type object shown below has no specified line breaks - the text simply reflows on its own to fit within its frame. Note that the line endings shown here are manual, using hard or soft returns.Īrea Type (right-hand type in Figure 1) also appears underlined, but is enclosed within a shape that contains small boxes on the upper left and lower right sides. Point Type (left-hand type in Figure 1) shows a single point on the first line and other lines are underlined. Normally, it’s pretty easy to make a distinction between Point and Area Type by looking at it when it is selected. (I’m using the term 'frame' here only because it’s a familiar word for InDesign users, but Illustrator really has no concept of a frame.) Area Type is used for larger blocks of text, where words flow from one line to the next and are encompassed within a shape or a frame. Point Type is used most often for random text objects that appear in your document and aren’t bound by any shape or frame.

The first thing to understand is that Illustrator has two types of text objects: Point Type and Area Type. Why this seemingly inconsistent behavior?

Sometimes it works as he wants it to, while other times, it doesn’t - which leads to frustration and acts of computer violence. He wants to simply resize the frame, allowing the text within to reflow without changing size. For example, someone scales his text frame only to find that the text within the frame becomes scaled as well. I often get questions about scaling text in Illustrator CS, CS2, and CS3.

Illustrator how to resize image