The Paragraph Panel in Adobe CS5 Illustrator
The Adobe Creative Suite 5 (Adobe CS5) Illustrator Paragraph panel has all the attributes that apply to an entire paragraph, such as alignment, indents and hyphenation. Hyphenation is not covered in this article.
Access the Paragraph panel quickly by clicking the Paragraph hyperlink in the Control panel or by choosing Window→Type→Paragraph. For example, you can’t flush left one word in a paragraph — when you click the Flush Left button, the entire paragraph flushes left. To see additional options in the Paragraph panel, click the triangle in the upper right corner of the panel (the panel menu) and choose Show Options.
You can choose any of the following alignment methods by clicking the appropriate button on the Paragraph panel:
Flush Left: All text is flush to the left with a ragged edge on the right. This is the most common way to align text.
Center: All text is centered.
Flush Right: All text is flush to the right and ragged on the left.
Justify with the Last Line Aligned Left: Right and left edges are both straight, with the last line left-aligned.
Justify with the Last Line Aligned Center: Right and left edges are both straight, with the last line centered.
Justify with the Last Line Aligned Right: Right and left edges are both straight, with the last line right-aligned.
Justify All Lines: In this forced justification method, the last line is stretched the entire column width, no matter how short it is. This alignment is used in many publications, but it can create some awful results.
You can choose from the following methods of indentation:
First Line Indent: Indents the first line of every paragraph. In other words, every time you press the Enter (Windows) or Return (Mac) key, this spacing is created.
To avoid first-line indents and space after from occurring — if you just want to break a line in a specific place, for example — create a line break or a soft return by pressing Shift+Enter (Windows) or Shift+Return (Mac).
Right Indent: Indents from the right side of the column of text.
Left Indent: Indents from the left side of the column of text.
Use the Eyedropper tool to copy the character, paragraph, fill, and stroke attributes. Select the text you want, select the Eyedropper tool, and click the text once with the attributes you want to apply to the selected text.
By default, the Eyedropper affects all attributes of a type selection, including appearance attributes. To customize the attributes affected by these tools, double-click the Eyedropper tool to open the Eyedropper dialog box.