- [Instructor] In this movie,
we'll take a look at how you align text to the pixel grid.
And so notice that I have some
live editable text in the top left corner of this document.
I'll go ahead and select it
with a black arrow tool,
and then I'll press Control + or Command + on a Mac,
in order to zoom-in, and you can see,
that in addition to this essential anti-aliasing
that's associated with a curved and diagonal edges,
we have this unproductive anti-aliasing
along the vertical and horizontal edges.
Now, in a perfect world you'd be able to
align this text to the pixel grid
just by turning on that icon
on the far-right side of the control panel,
but notice that it's dimmed.
And that's because, as things stand
as I'm recording this movie,
you can't align editable text to the pixel grid.
So what you do instead
is go up to the Type menu
and choose Create Outlines
which is going to convert the text to static path outlines.
So, obviously you need to make sure
that all of your edits are done,
then go ahead and choose the command.
Now notice at this point,
the horizontal and vertical edges
are still anti-aliased,
and to make that abundantly clear,
I'll press Control H or Command H on a Mac
to hide those selection edges.
And so if you want to get rid of all that anti-aliasing,
around the i for example,
then just go ahead and click on that icon,
which is now available.
And notice that all that anti-aliasing goes away.
Problem is, things may not work out
exactly the way you'd like,
and so notice that all of the letters
are looking really great,
except for the lower case Ns,
and so as you can see here,
this right-hand vertical stem
is wider and shorter than it's counterpart
over on the left-hand side,
and so if you want to fix that problem,
you need to press Control H,
or Command H on a Mac,
in order to bring back those selection edges,
and then press the A key to switch to the white arrow tool,
and now I'll just go ahead and click on this point
and shift-click on this one
and press the down arrow key
in order to nudge them into a more desirable position
so that they're aligned to the baseline
along with the other letters,
and then I'll click on this anchor point
and shift-click on this guy right there,
and press the right arrow key
so that the two vertical stems are the same width.
And so you may find yourself
running into those kinds of problems.
Another thing to note
is that you only want to align big, bold display type
to the pixel grid,
and that's because aligning small or thin letters
can cause problems.
And to see what that looks like,
I'll go ahead and switch over to this document right here,
and I'll zoom-in on this left-hand iPhone.
Now, at this point, everything looks great
and that's because of Pixel Preview is turned off,
and so to turn it on, I'll go up to the View menu
and choose Pixel Preview,
at which point we can see that
we have some problems.
Now notice that we have some anti-aliasing
along this top horizontal edge,
obviously we have a lot of anti-aliasing
inside the letters,
we also have some bad edges
up here at the top of this case, and so-forth.
And along the top of this left-hand phone.
And so to fix all that,
you'd want to go up to the Select menu,
choose Object, and then notice this command right here,
Not Aligned To Pixel Grid.
And so this command is going to allow you to select
everything inside the active document
that is not already aligned,
which happens to be everything in this particular document,
and then I'll right-click inside the document window
and choose Make Pixel Perfect.
And notice that does exactly what we want it to do
along those horizontal and vertical edges,
but it doesn't appear to do much at all to the text.
But now notice, if I were to go up to the View menu
and turn off Pixel Preview,
that we've messed the text up significantly.
And so this is how it had appeared before
and this is how it looks after.
And so imagine that you want to create a document
that works equally well in print and onscreen,
in that case,
go ahead and undo that last modification like so,
and then I'll press the V key
to switch back to my black arrow tool,
I'll shift-click on those letters to deselect them,
and then I'll just go ahead
and scroll over to the left-hand iPhone
and I'll shift-click on it's letters
to deselect them as well,
and now with the text deselected,
I'll go ahead and once again,
right-click inside the document window
and choose Make Pixel Perfect
in order to align everything
except the text to the pixel grid.
Now at this point, I no longer want the bounding box,
so I'll go up to the View menu
and choose Hide Bounding Box to get rid of it,
and then I'll press Control Shift A,
or Command Shift A on a Mac,
to deselect my artwork.
And the result is an illustration
that will have no anti-aliasing
along it's horizontal or vertical edges.
And then, just so we can see the difference here,
I'll go up to the View menu
and choose Pixel Preview,
and again as you can see here,
our horizontal and vertical edges
no longer have any anti-aliasing whatsoever,
and yet, if we were to print the document,
the text would look absolutely great.
And so what we have is effectively the best of both worlds.
And so just remember,
if you want to align big, bold display type
to the pixel grid inside Illustrator CC,
you first need to convert it to static path outlines.