4. Adding and Styling Text
Only a few slight changes need to be made to complete Lesson 4 in the third-quarter 2012 release of Adobe Muse. There have been some improvements in the Font user interface, as well as various typesetting additions.
There is also a minor change to the rotation of objects that will affect the outcome of the lesson. The angle of rotation when transforming content has changed from 0–360 degrees to -180 to 180 degrees, like other Adobe applications. While the lesson may not have changed very much, it will be important to go through the additions since they affect how the Font menu appears.
Font Improvements
The first change, on page 94, involves what used to be called Letter Space. In the figure at the bottom of page 94, the parts of the Text panel are called out. The Letter Space option is now called Tracking. Any references to Letter Space throughout the lesson and rest of the Classroom in a Book should now be referred to as Tracking.
At the bottom of page 96, when you click the Font menu in the Control panel (step 2), you will now see a much larger initial menu that is organized by font type (web, web safe, and system). The Font menu interface has changed quite a bit from the initial release of Adobe Muse.
It would be advisable to replace the sections “Apply a web safe font” and the first two steps of “Apply a system font” starting at the bottom of page 96 and ending on page 98 in the Classroom in a Book with the following to utilize the new menu:
1. Double-click the placed text frame to switch to the Text tool. Insert the cursor in the text, and choose Edit > Select All.
2. Click the Font menu in the Control panel.
In the Font menu that appears, you will see a single sectioned list, with shortcuts to scroll to each of the three font categories available: Web Fonts, Web Safe Fonts, and System Fonts. At the top of the menu is a search field where you can search by entering a font name or partial font name.
3. In the menu, click the Web Safe Fonts category shortcut to scroll to those fonts. Position the pointer over the font Georgia in the list that appears.
A yellow tooltip appears. In the tooltip, you’ll see the words “Alt Fonts:” and a listing of fonts. On the Web, if you choose a web-safe font, just because it’s web safe doesn’t guarantee it will work, because visitors need to have the font (Georgia in this example) on their machines. The alt fonts are second, third, and so on, choices for the browser, just in case Georgia isn’t available. You don’t have to worry about alt fonts, and you cannot change them in Muse. Just know that Muse selects fonts that are similar to your first choice font.
4. Click to select Georgia to apply that font to the text.
Apply a system font
The next category of font you will use is a system font. Applying this type of font converts the text into an image.
1. With the Text tool still selected, select the heading text “About Kevin’s Koffee Kart.”
2. Click the Font menu in the Control panel, and notice that the font menu displays an automatically generated list of recently used fonts at the top of the menu. In the search field at the top of the menu, type “new.” The list of fonts will be filtered to show the fonts with the word “new” in their name.
The font list can be filtered by font family (e.g., “Myriad Pro”), weight or style (e.g., “Bold Italic”), a combination of these (e.g., “Myriad Pro Bold Italic”), including partial names in any order (e.g., “It Bold Myr Pro”).
The number of recently used fonts to display can be configured, and the list can be cleared by choosing Adobe Muse > Preferences (Mac OS) or Edit > Preferences (Windows) and clicking Clear Recent Fonts.
3. Position the pointer over the News Gothic Std font name and choose Bold from the menu that appears.
Web fonts and system fonts are grouped by font family; individual weights and styles (e.g., Bold, Italic, Bold Italic, etc.) of multiface font families appear in sub-menus.
On the bottom of page 97, step 2, there is added content for Windows users. Windows users can now ignore those added instructions, because Muse now uses platform-independent references to fonts. This means Adobe Muse documents can be exchanged between Mac and Windows without failure to resolve font references.
At this point, you can continue on to step 3 at the top of page 98.
On page 98, toward the bottom at step 2, the font menu is used again, this time to apply a web font. The difference in instruction for step 2 is as follows:
Click the Font menu in the Control panel, and then click the Web Fonts category in the menu to see the options. Position the pointer over the Add Web Fonts option and click.
You may not see Droid Sans Bold listed in the Web Fonts category as shown in the figure, and that’s okay.
Continue on with step 3 on page 98. As you continue and choose your own web fonts, you will notice that the fonts you see in the Add Web fonts dialog box (as seen on page 99), will be different, and that’s okay.
On page 101, step 14, as previously mentioned, web fonts are grouped by font family; individual weights and styles (e.g. Bold, Italic, Bold Italic, etc.) of multiface font families appear in submenus. So you will position the pointer over the font you chose (we chose Passion One this time) in the list and choose Bold from the submenu that appears. The font you select may not have styles like Bold. In that case, simply click the font name to apply it.
In the section “Changing alignment, leading, and letter spacing,” Letter Spacing is now called Tracking (as was mentioned in Lesson 4, “Adding and Styling Text”). Any reference to Letter Spacing going forward should now be Tracking.
Applying Styles
There is a new feature in working with Paragraph and Character styles. You can now drag and drop a Paragraph style or Character style onto a text frame to apply the style to the text.
On page 112, steps 6 and 7, when applying a Paragraph style, you can try a different approach:
1. Select the [None] style to set the formatting back to default.
2. Choose Edit > Deselect All.
3. In the Paragraph Styles panel, click and drag the Heading style from the panel directly onto the caption text frame with the text “Photo by: Karen Koffee” to apply it.
4. Select the Text tool and select the text “Photo by: Karen Koffee.”
Continue on to step 8 on page 113.
Transforming Content
When rotating content in the page area, there is now feedback in the form of a measurement label that indicates the rotation angle as you rotate. The angle of rotation has also changed from a range of 0 to 360 degrees to a range of -180 to 180 degrees, like other Adobe applications.
On the top of page 118, step 4, as you rotate, you will now see the angle of rotation next to the pointer as you rotate.
In step 5 on that same page 118, it is noted to make sure that the Rotation Angle is 270. That value is no longer possible and should instead be -90.
