- [Voiceover] In this movie, I'll show you a simple
but practical application of caps and joins
that allows us to create these rounded letter forms
down here at the bottom of this document.
And I'll also introduce you to the Save Selection command.
All right, so the last time that we saw this document,
we were way zoomed in to the purple infinity,
but what I want to be able to do
is stay zoomed in on these letters down here
while selecting all of them.
And that's something I can do
if I take a moment to save my selection.
So I'll start by pressing Control + 0
or Command + 0 on a Mac to fit the document on screen,
and then I'll go ahead and marquee these letters like so
using the black arrow tool.
Now let's say I want to save this selection for later use.
That is to say, I want to save the fact
that these letters are selected
and so I can come back to them any time I like.
In that case, I go up to the Select menu
and choose the Save Selection command, and I'll just
go ahead and call this selection Letters and click OK.
And now notice, if I click off the letters
to deselect them and then I go ahead and zoom in tight
on the a and the b like so, I can reselect
all of those letters just by returning
to the Select menu and choosing what is now
the last command in the menu, Letters,
and that will go ahead and reselect
every single letter in the document.
All right, but in truth, I'm zoomed in
a little too tight here.
What I want to do is create some guides
that will help demonstrate how things
have gotten off where these letters are concerned
as a function of that 20-point stroke.
And so I'll go ahead and press Control + R
or Command + R in a Mac in order to bring up my rulers.
And I'll drag a horizontal guide down from the top ruler
so that it snaps into alignment with the top anchor point
in the F, which by the way, notice, aligns perfectly
with the top anchor point in the h,
and yet we're not seeing that alignment
because 10 points, that is half of that stroke,
pops up on the edge of the f,
whereas it just abruptly ends at the top of the h.
All right, now, I'll go ahead and drag out
another horizontal guide from that top ruler
so that it snaps into alignment with the bottom of the f.
And notice, even though that bottom anchor point
in the f is precisely aligned with the bottom anchor point
in the e, we're not seeing that alignment,
and that's because the bottom of the f ends abruptly
whereas half of that stroke continues
around the bottom of the e.
We have an even bigger problem
where the bottoms of the b and d are concerned,
because notice here, as a function of this half-align weight
that's dropping down below the curved portions
of both letters, we're covering the stems,
which come down just as far.
So what I'm going to do, just to make point
that much more obvious, I'm going to scroll over here
just a little bit and I'm going to hide the rulers
by pressing Control + R or Command + R on a Mac
and then I'll go up to the View menu,
choose Guides, and choose the Lock Guides command
to turn it off, and then I'll marquee this bottom guide
right there, and I'm going to make a copy of it
10 points down by pressing Shift + Alt + down arrow.
That would Shift + Option + down arrow on the Mac,
so that we now have a guide that's aligned
to the bottom of the curved portions of these letters.
And now, I'll click on this top guide to select it,
and I'll press Shift + Alt + up arrow
or Shift + Option + up arrow on the Mac
in order to create a guide at the perceived top of the f.
All right, now I'll go ahead and click off the guide
to deselect it and I'll return to the View menu,
choose Guides, and then choose Lock Guides
to turn the command back on,
and that way I won't mess up my guide lines.
All right, now I'll return to the Select menu
and choose Letters in order to select all the letters
in the document, and I'll click on the word Stroke
up here in the Control Panel, and I'll switch
to the Projecting Cap, just so we can see
what kind of difference it makes.
And notice that it goes ahead and extends
the crossbar here on the f quite nicely
so that we have some sharp transitions,
but we have a few problems here on the g
as well as the other letters, such as the d and the b,
that have multiple sub-paths
that are intersecting each other.
However, notice that all the letters are rising
to the occasion right here.
So we can see that the projecting cap
is extending all the way to the top guideline
as well as all the way down to the bottom guideline,
which means that we have some decent stems
for our b and d in particular.
But what's going to work out better all the way around
is to click on the word Stroke once again
and switch to the Round Cap in order to produce
this rounded effect here.
That does leave us with a problem, however.;
Notice if I go ahead and scroll over here,
we're missing and edge down here on the left side of the h,
and we also have a sharp corner
over here on the right side of the letter e.
Now to demonstrate why we're having this problem on the h,
I'll press the A key to switch to the white arrow tool,
then I'll go ahead and click off the letter,
and I'll select this anchor point
as well as these other three.
So, in other words, I'm clicking on this anchor point
and then I'm Shift-clicking on the other three,
and now I'll press Shift + right arrow
to nudge those points to the right,
and you can see what we really have here
is a corner at this location,
and now that I've moved the points over,
we've reestablished this miter join,
but as soon as I move things back,
we lose the miter join, because our miter limit is too low.
And as soon as you have two segments
that are right on top of each other like this,
then it doesn't matter what you set the miter limit to,
your corner is going to get beveled.
All right, so to take care of this problem,
I'll return to the Select menu
and choose the Letters command,
and then I'll click on the word Stroke.
Obviously, the Miter Join is not going to work out for us.
You could try a Bevel Join, but it's not going
to have any effect on the h, and it's just going
to slightly clip the corner on the e.
What we really want is a nice round join,
which is going to give us round corner on the e
and it's going to totally take care
of our problem here on the h.
After which point, I'll just go ahead
and press the Escape key to hide that panel
and I'll press Control + 0 or Command + 0
to center my zoom.