- [Instructor] In this movie, I'll show you how to divide
all of our text frames into three columns a piece
using the Area Type Options command.
So the first thing I want you to do
is click on the first art board to make it active
and then press Control A or Command A on the Mac
to select everything across all three art boards
and now press Control 0 or Command 0 on the Mac
to zoom in on the first art board like so.
Alright now with every one of these text frames selected,
you want to go up to the Type menu and choose Area Type
Options, now Area Type is Illustrator's name for text
inside of a frame and that will go ahead and bring up
this dialog box that we're seeing here.
Now you have the option of dividing the text into rows
if you want, we're looking for columns but you're not going
to be able to see anything happen until you turn on
the Preview checkbox down here in the lower left corner
of the dialog box.
Now click inside the number option and press the up arrow
key in order to increase the number of columns to two
and you'll see that you now have two columns inside
this frame, we want three so take it up to three columns.
And then we need to adjust the gutter by clicking inside
of that value and pressing the down arrow key to reduce
the size of the gutters between the columns until the span
value reconciles to 294 points and that happens when
a gutter is 13 points wide.
Now the span tells us the width of each one of the columns
you typically don't want to mess with it unless you're
going to go with a fixed column size so if you were
to turn on the fixed checkbox right there, just note
that this value says 294 by the way.
If I were to click and hold on this down pointing arrow
right here, notice what I'm doing is I'm reducing
the size of the entire text frame, so I'm making it
narrower and this becomes even more obvious if I click
inside the value and press Shift down arrow a few more
times, see how I'm losing the width of my columns, that is
not something that I want, but that is a function of having
fixed turned on, if I now turn fixed off, I'm basically
stuck with what I've done right here and I'm now going to
work inside these narrower text frames.
That's not what I want so I'm going to cancel out in order
to restore my original text frames and now I'll go back
to the Type menu and choose Area Type Options so once
again visit this dialog box, I'm just going to change
the number of columns to three and I'm going to change
the size of the gutter to 13 points because I know that
gets us our nice 294 point wide columns and then I'll turn
the Preview checkbox so I can see it happen
in the background.
At which point I'll go ahead and click OK in order to accept
that change and now if I go up to the View menu and choose
Fit All in Window or press that keyboard shortcut
of Control Alt 0 or Command Option 0 on the Mac you can see
that every one of my text frames is now divided into three
columns, now you don't need to worry about the fact that
the last text frame is now empty.
They're still threaded together so later when we make
the text larger it will automatically flow onto the third
art board.
Alright I'm going to press Control 0 or Command 0 again
in order to fit the first art board on screen and I'm
going to go ahead and zoom in on it as well so that we can
see the top left corner of this frame,
and now I'm going to click off the text to deselect it
and just click on any one of these lines of type here
to select just the first text frame the one on the first
art board that is.
Now I'd like to show you the other options that are
available to you inside of that dialog box.
I'm going to go up to the Type menu and choose Area Type
Options in order to bring the dialog box up on screen
and I'm going to turn on the Preview checkbox.
I want you to see this line right here, why do you want
water, he asked.
The scarecrow is asking Dorothy that because he doesn't
actually need water to survive, notice now if I change
the number of rows to four so that we have rows
and columns, that we now have this network of cells that
we're seeing right here.
So in other words the text is flowing from this top left
cell into the one directly to the right of it.
You see why do you want water right there and that is
a function of this text flow setting.
If you want it to flow from the top cell to the next one
down then you would click the second icon like so
and then why do you want water drops to the next cell down.
Alright but I'm not really looking for rows so I'm going to
change that number value back to one so that we get rid
of the rows entirely.
Right now notice this inset spacing option if I click
and hold on this little up arrow icon, you can see that
that insets the text within the text frame and so that's
another way to get a little bit of an extra margin.
I'm going to change that value to zero however so I can
demonstrate first baseline, right now it's set to ascent
so it means the tops of the tallest letters are aligning
to the top of the frame, but I could change it to a bunch
of different options including x Height and that's
going to scoot the letters up so that the top
of the lowercase letters are aligned to the top of the frame
you can also enter a specific value, for example if I change
this minimum value to 20 then that's going to drop
the top of the lowercase letters 20 points down from
the top of the frame.
And so why you would do that totally up to you but I just
want you to know these options are here.
I don't want to make any of these changes so I'm just
going to go ahead and click the Cancel button in order
to escape that dialog box.
And that's how you establish a series of multi column text
frames using the Area Type options command here
inside Illustrator.