Chapter 6. Typography

Adobe Illustrator is a top-notch illustration tool, but it is also capable of setting professional-level typeits typography features are on par with those found in the award-winning Adobe InDesign.

In truth, prior to Illustrator CS, setting type in Illustrator was something you did only if you really had to. Things like setting columns of type, creating lists with tab leaders, or creating text wraps were either impossible or extremely difficult to do and control. With the release of Illustrator CS, however, Adobe has replaced an aging text engine with a modern, powerful one that offers features like paragraph style sheets, optical kerning, and OpenType support. Even more important, this new text engine brings a level of global technology to Illustrator that enables seamless integration across multiple systems and languages.

In this chapter, we'll explore some of these important technologies, like Unicode compliance, as well as some of the new typography features found in Illustrator. Toward the end of the chapter, we'll discuss a very important side effect of all of this new technologybackward compatibility with previous versions of Illustrator.