I am having trouble being able to veiw the different fonts that are available through illustrator. In another program (I think its my Corel Draw) I am able to type a few words, select them, and then start clicking on fonts to see how they change the selected text (this makes it easy to select the best looking font for the job). Can you do this in Illustrator 10? If not, is there anyway that you know of to view the different fonts so that I don't have to memorize (by name) what the fonts look like? Also, my Illustrator instruction book does not have examples of fonts (like my Corel Draw book had), is there a web site that has fonts and their names or a book I could get that shows these fonts?
Thanks again!
Mark
P.S. Is there a good source for unusual fonts that can be used in graphic design that is free or inexpensive.
Answer They still haven't improved that, huh?
There IS a round-about way to be able to actively sample the fonts like you'd like to, but sometimes it's hard to remember the key sequence and you mess up, so be patient.
PhotoShop works sort of like this, too.
1) Select the block of text you want to change and keep it selected for the remainder of this instruction.
2) Bring up the Character Window (Ctrl+T).
3) In the Font field in the Character Window, pick the first font in your list, for our purposes, let's say it's Arial. When you do this, the text you've selected in your document will change to Arial.
4) Keeping the text selected, go back and click once on the word Arial in the Character Window, so that it is highlighted.
Here's where the key sequence bit comes in.
5) Hold down your SHIFT key.
6) Keeping the SHIFT key down, hit the DOWN cursor key (middle of the 4 arrow keys).
The next font in the Character Window list is selected.
7) Still keeping the SHIFT key down, hit the ENTER key.
The text in your document changes to the next font.
8) Ever keeping that SHIFT key down, hit DOWN ARROW, ENTER, DOWN ARROW, ENTER... etc. You'll go through the whole list.
Also, if you keep the shift key held down and type the first few letters of the name of the font in the Character Window and hit enter (shift key still held down), you can keep typing and retyping to pick your favorite fonts by name, without having to go through the whole list. You'll have to try it to see what I mean.
As far as lists of fonts, I made myself a cheat sheet of the fonts on my computer and it really saves time. Take some time and type up a list of the fonts on your machine in an Illustrator document, then change each name to match its typeface.
