- [Voiceover] So if you think about how things
would really work, our sculpted letters are not truly
centered inside of their squares.
And so what we have right now is an equal amount
of horizontal space between the extruded edge
and the right side of the square as between
the forward edge and the left hand side of the square.
If these things were really sculpted
and they were really centered,
it'd be the backsides of the letters that would be centered
and then the forward sides would be coming outward.
Meaning that all of our letters and numbers need to move
slightly up and to the left.
But to what degree is the question.
Now we can find out exactly how much these letters
should move using the alignment options.
And so I'm gonna switch over to my document so far,
and the trick is to find a representative letter.
And probably the simplest letter of them all here
in terms of expressing it as a shape, is the "O."
And so what I'm gonna do is press the A key
to switch to the white arrow tool,
and then I'm gonna click inside the red portion
of the O to select that entire path.
And the reason I'm using the white arrow tool
is because the red and the black path outlines
are grouped together.
Now it's a little hard to see these anchor points,
red on red, so I'm gonna double click on an empty portion
of the letters layer, and I'm gonna change the color
to something that's gonna stand out better, like gold.
And then I'll click okay.
Alright, now we what we wanna do is copy this guy,
so go ahead and press Control + C, or Command + C on a Mac.
And then, press Control + Shift + A,
or Command + Shift + A on a Mac, to deselect your artwork.
Press the V key to switch to the black arrow tool,
and press Control + F, or Command + F on a Mac,
in order to paste that guy in front.
Alright, now we need to make it larger so that it
takes up this forward side of the letter,
and we're gonna do that using that special scaling option
that we saw in the previous chapter, Offset Path.
And so go up to the object menu, choose path,
and then choose Offset Path.
And you're gonna start with an offset value of 10,
at which point if you turn a preview checkbox on,
you'll see that's way too big.
Something like three is a lot closer,
but it's still a little bit too big
and so if you wanna get it exactly right,
try out 2.5 for a moment, and you'll see that almost
goes all the way to the edge, which is why I came up
with a value of 2.7 points,
which looks spot on to me.
And so I'll go ahead and click okay in order
to accept that change.
Alright, now just go ahead and cut this guy out of the way
by pressing Control + X, or Command + X on a Mac,
and that will show you that the original's still left over.
So go ahead and click on it to select it and press
the Backspace key or the Delete key on a Mac.
Now, select the checker right there,
and press Control + F, or Command + F on a Mac
to paste this guy to this other layer.
And that should work assuming that Paste Remembers Layers
is turned off here inside the layers panel fly out menu.
Alright, now I wanna demonstrate what
I'm talking about here, you don't really have to
move this guy to a different location,
but I'm gonna go ahead and drag it down into the right,
so that you can see this is where the back of the 3D letter
would actually be located.
And so now what I want you to do is Shift + Click
on a square, so that both of these shapes are selected,
and then click on a square again to make it the key object.
Then go up to the control panel and click on
the Horizontal Align Center icon, followed by
the Vertical Align Center icon in order to
move that shape to the proper location.
Alright, now let's select all of the characters,
which are relegated to the letters layer,
by clicking in the upper right corner of that layer like so.
And then you wanna switch to the outline mode
by going to the view menu and choosing the outline command
way up here at the top, or you can press Control + Y,
or Command + Y on a Mac.
And I'm gonna go ahead and zoom in a little,
just so that I know I'm doing this properly,
and I'll go ahead and drag this guy until we get a snap.
See the Smart Guide snap right there,
at the bottom of the letter.
And you way see a snap on the right hand side as well,
but you just wanna get it more or less into place like so,
then you can select that dummy path right there,
the one that you were using for alignment purposes.
And if you're working along with me,
then your anchor points should appear blue
to tell you that you're working on the blue checkers layer.
At which point press the Backspace key,
or the Delete key on a Mac in order
to get rid of that shape.
Then press Control + 0, or Command + 0 on a Mac
to zoom out, and press Control + Y
or Command + Y on a Mac to switch back to the preview mode.
And we now have 3D letters that appear
to be properly centered inside of their squares.
And that's how you precisely center the backs
of your extruded letters using a combination
of the offset path command, along with the alignment options
here inside Illustrator.