Handling text boxes in Illustrator

talk design
1

hey all,

I’m encountering this frustrating little thing in Illustrator which i hope has a simple solution:

often, when i’m typing text or copying it from another source, i’ll just click to start a text object and paste the text in, without thinking how wide i want the column to be. Then, if i want to resize the column (note, NOT the actual font size, but the column, i.e how wide it is before the text goes to the next line) it seems like i have to make a new text object and drag the box out, then paste the text in.

its not a huge deal, but it annoys me… i’m used to another program where by default scaling the text box changes the column size, and atcually changing the character dimensions is harder.

is there any trick to this? any way to convert a normal text object to a column one?

thanks
Stu

2

select the text box with the black arrow, then use the white arrow (and shift) to select textbox points one by one. You can move them around.

I agree that it’s quite crappy to use.

3

You can also go Type>Area Type Options and it lets you manually enter sizes, which resizes the box not text.