00:01:34 But where this text is concerned,
00:01:35 that's not the way I want to work.
00:01:37 So I'm going to change that value to zero
00:01:40 and then press the Tab key.
00:01:42 And so instead of having a first line indent
00:01:44 in order to distinguish one paragraph from another,
00:01:47 I'm going to enter a Space before
00:01:49 or Space after the paragraph,
00:01:51 but I'm going to start by just zeroing out these values
00:01:54 so I know what I have to work with.
00:01:56 So you can see, if you don't have a first line indent
00:01:58 or you don't have some kind of paragraph spacing,
00:02:01 then your text is just going to run together.
00:02:03 But, if I were to just click
00:02:05 in this Space before value right here,
00:02:07 and press the Up arrow key a few times,
00:02:10 you can see that that helps to move those paragraphs apart,
00:02:13 and at a value of five points things look pretty great.
00:02:17 Now, when you're working with body copy,
00:02:19 you can Align the text to the left.
00:02:21 You generally never want to center it,
00:02:23 or align it to the right.
00:02:25 But while left is okay,
00:02:26 it leaves a ragged effect on the right-hand side.
00:02:29 If you want to make sure everybody's aligned
00:02:31 on the right as well,
00:02:32 then you want to switch to one of the Justify options,
00:02:35 most likely Justify with last line aligned left,
00:02:39 which is this fourth setting right here,
00:02:42 and that's going to give you this effect
00:02:44 with the last line on the left as we're seeing right here.
00:02:48 At which point I'll go ahead and press the Escape key
00:02:50 in order to hide that Paragraph panel.
00:02:52 Now let's take a look
00:02:53 at our character formatting attributes
00:02:55 by clicking on the word Character
00:02:57 and I'm going to change the font,
00:02:58 which you can see is already selected, to Minions.
00:03:01 So I'm just going to type in M-I-N-I
00:03:04 and that should get me to the various styles
00:03:06 of Minion Pro.
00:03:07 The one I want is this guy right here,
00:03:09 that's just called Minion Pro and nothing more,
00:03:12 and what does is it selects the regular style.
00:03:15 Alright, so having done that,
00:03:16 I'm going to dial in a type size value
00:03:19 into this very first numeric field,
00:03:21 and I'm going to set that type size to 14 points.
00:03:25 And by the way, the type size is a container
00:03:27 that holds everything from the highest ascenders
00:03:30 down to the lowest descenders.
00:03:33 And you can get a sense for just how tall that container is
00:03:36 by tabbing your way over to the Leading value.
00:03:39 Now notice when I hover over this little icon here,
00:03:42 that I can see the tool tip that says Set the leading.
00:03:46 It's actually led-ing,
00:03:47 because back in the days of hot metal type
00:03:49 they used to insert lead between one line of type
00:03:53 and the next.
00:03:54 And so leading is the distance between the baseline,
00:03:57 the line upon which the type sits,
00:04:00 and the next baseline up.
00:04:01 So it's essentially the distance between one line of type
00:04:04 to the next line of type.
00:04:06 If I were to set it to the same value
00:04:08 as the type size,
00:04:10 we'd end up with solid leading.
00:04:12 So a type size of 14 on 14 point leading,
00:04:15 is solid leading,
00:04:17 and we can see how the tops of the ascenders,
00:04:19 or at least the top of this capital letter here,
00:04:21 is almost touching the bottom of the descender,
00:04:23 meaning the bottom of that letter Y.
00:04:27 If you want a little more space,
00:04:28 as you generally do,
00:04:29 then you can click this down pointing arrowhead,
00:04:31 and swich to Auto.
00:04:33 And Auto is going to automatically assign
00:04:36 a leading value that's 120% of the type size,
00:04:40 so notice right now it's 16.8 points.
00:04:42 If I was to click in the Size value
00:04:44 and press the Up arrow key to send it up to 15,
00:04:47 then the leading value would expand to 18 points.
00:04:51 I actually want that leading value to be exactly 17 points,
00:04:55 so I'm going to override the current value,
00:04:57 and then I'm going to take the type size value
00:04:59 back down to what it was, which is 14.
00:05:02 Alright finally, we don't want to leave
00:05:04 this kerning value set to zero.
00:05:06 That is never a good idea.
00:05:08 If you ever see that,
00:05:10 then go ahead and click this down pointing arrowhead,
00:05:12 and choose Auto.
00:05:14 Auto is going to work great for body copy,
00:05:16 and you can see it's slightly adjusting
00:05:18 the horizontal positions of all of the selected characters.
00:05:22 And for the most legible results,
00:05:24 you also want to leave the Tracking value
00:05:26 set to its default, which is zero.
00:05:28 At which point you can go ahead and press the Escape key
00:05:30 in order to hide the Character panel.
00:05:32 And then you can press the Escape key a second time
00:05:35 in order to escape the text editing mode
00:05:37 and switch back to the black arrow tool,
00:05:39 at which point I'll click off the text to deselect it.
00:05:43 And now, even if I press Ctrl 0,
00:05:45 or Cmd 0 on the Mac,
00:05:46 to fit the document on screen,
00:05:48 it remains nice and legible
00:05:50 even within the context of this video.
00:05:53 And those are a few different ways
00:05:54 to format body copy here inside Illustrator.