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 September
12, 1999
Working with Text Blocks
This series of quick tips will help you
out in working with FreeHand's very versatile Text Blocks.
As you will see, there are many ways to control a Text Block by changing
the text size, shape, leading, spacing and
color. Power users will be very familiar with these techniques,
but they may not be too obvious to the beginner.
Version: 4 and above
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Scaling Text
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Above is a basic text block. The
dots on the edges are control handles. You can expand a text block
by simply click+dragging from one of the corner handles
to show or hide some of the text in the block.
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You can scale the text within
a text block when click+dragging the corner handles by
holding down the Option(Alt) key. Like shown above, you
can really customize your text's horizontal scale, and size.
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If you get something you like from
this, make sure to get the text specs like the Size and
Horizontal Scale as shown above. It's usually a good idea
to go in and round the values off to whole numbers. It could be
pretty tiresome to tell clients "It's 134.234 pt ImprovRegular
with a 42.41 Horizontal Scale." heh heh.
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Using this same method, you can
also constrain the text by holding down Shift+Option(Alt)
while click+dragging on the corner handle like shown above.
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Changing Leading, Word
Spacing, and Kerning
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This next example is a text block
with a couple of paragraphs of text. To change the overall leading
of a text block, click+drag from the top or bottom point
of the text block.
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You can change the overall Kerning
of a text block by click+dragging from the side points
of the block.
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To change the Word Spacing without
changing the Kerning, hold the Option(Alt) key while click+dragging
from a side point.
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Auto-Expanding Text
Blocks
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FreeHand has these extraordinary
text blocks that can auto-expand or collapse by
double-clicking on certain areas.
The above example is how you can
collapse a text block to exactly fit the text inside. Just
double-click on that Link box on the bottom.
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Ever see that Link Box with a black
circle in it? Well that means that there is more text hidden
inside the text block.
The fastest way to see it is by
double-clicking on one of the side points of the
block. This changes your text block into an auto-expanding block
which you can differentiate by the now open points on the
sides of the block as seen above.
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You can do the same for text that
you may want to continue flowing down. Just double-click
on the the bottom point of the text block.
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Besides using the Link box to auto-collapse
a text block, you can use it to create links between text blocks.
Like shown above, I created a link
between the two text blocks by click+dragging from the
full Link box, to the empty text block.
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Controlling Color in
a Text Block
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Like shown above, you have a lot
of control of text's color in a text block. You can add
color to individual letters, whole words, and even give letters
an outline just by selecting the letter and choosing the
colors in the Color palette.
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Well I hope that you learned some pretty
powerful text block techniques in these lessons. It's taken me years
to grapple some of these, but you get used to them. If you have any
others you'd like to have me point out that I may have forgotten, please
let me know via the Feedback page. 
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