Text Enhancements in Adobe Fireworks CS5

Description

With the new Adobe Text Engine, which is shared with InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator, a series of 12 text enhancements has been introduced in Fireworks CS5.

Requirement

Adobe Fireworks CS5 and higher

Article

1. Ability to multi-select text characters inside a text block

Press the Shift key to select multiple different characters or words present at different locations inside a single text block. After highlighting some text characters using your mouse, we can keep the shift key pressed and highlight characters at some other place in the text block

You can then apply changes to the selection such as font, style, color, etc.



Figure 1: Multiple selection

For multi-select to work you have to be in a fixed-width text block. For more details check: Auto-sizing and fixed-width text blocks

2. Ability to select similar characters inside a text block
1. Alt/Option + double click

Press Alt/Option and then double-click on a single word/character that has styled attributes (bold for example), selects all others words/characters with the same attributes present in that text block. Here some characters/words are bold and blue.



Figure 2: Alt/Option + double click

2. Shift + Alt/Option and single click

Press Shift + Alt/Option and single click on any character/word will get that word added to the already made selection in a).

3. Shift + Alt/Option and double click

Press Shift + Alt/Option and double click on any word/character with another styled attribute /properties will add all such second type of similar characters to the previous selection made and so on.



Figure 3: Shift + Alt/Option and double click

4. Deselect

Press Alt/Option + single click on any word in the selection will de-select that word from that selection.

3. Editable font list (Windows only)

The editable font list means that in the font list drop down menu, you can also type-in the font name to apply it. This is especially helpful when there are many fonts and the drop down list can be huge, but you know the font name.



Figure 4: Editable Font List

Workflow

1. Type some text, select the text,
2. In the font list box select the font name with your cursor with a single click,
3. Type another font name, Arial for example, and press Return to apply the new font.
4. Undo the changes

Ability to undo the changes done while being inside the text editing mode. I.e., undo at a character level is now possible in the editable mode.

Earlier we were able to undo changes made to the text element at the object level. Now, we can undo any changes made while being inside the text editing mode itself. All the changes done (even typing of characters etc) are stored internally and can be un-done using Ctrl/Cmd + Z and re-done using Ctrl/Cmd + Y.

5. Kerning

Kerning between the characters can be changed by keeping the cursor in-between and using the keyboard arrow keys. The slider value has also been increased to 200 now.

This ability to increase/decrease the kerning/tracking value has been restored back as that it was in Fireworks 8 or Fireworks CS3. By keeping the cursor between 2 characters, we can change kerning value by even using the keyboard shortcut for the same.

Workflows:

1. By keeping the cursor between any 2 characters, we can increase/decrease the Kerning value by 10 points using, Ctrl/Cmd + Left/Right arrow keys or by using the slider in PI.
2. By keeping the cursor between any 2 characters, we can increase/decrease the kerning value by 100 points using, Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + Left/Right arrow keys or by using the slider in PI.
3. By selecting a range of characters inside a text block, we can increase/decrease their Tracking value by 10 points using, Ctrl/Cmd + Left/Right arrow keys or by using the slider in PI.
4. By selecting a range of characters inside a text block, we can increase/decrease their Tracking value by 100 points using, Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + Left/Right arrow keys or by using the slider in PI.
6. Kerning values of previous versions

CS3 Kerning/Tracking values will automatically be mapped, when opened in Fireworks CS5 and the look will be preserved.

Kerning/Tracking values that would have been applied to CS3 or legacy text objects would not be the same when opened in post CS4 builds.(i.e. essentially due to the change in text engines from CS3 to CS4). Now, we have made sure that this mapping of CS3 kerning/tracking values is automatically done when opened in FWCS5.

For example, a kerning value of 10 applied to CS3 text would automatically show up as 100 when opened in CS5, and as a result the look will be preserved. 10 value of CS3 being equivalent to 100 as per the new text engine and so on...

7. Overflow indicator

Text overflow indicator will be shown in case of extra characters that are not fitting for text-in-path or text-on-path.

If we have chosen to attach some text inside a path or on-path, then it can sometimes happen that the text characters are more than the path length that was chosen. Thus, in such cases wherein some of the text characters are not being shown because of in-sufficient path length, a text overflow indicator would be shown. This gives a visual indication to the user that a lot more text characters are actually present here. A red icon is shown.

For more details see tutorial: Overflow indicator

8. Triple clicking

Triple clicking inside a text block will now automatically select the whole paragraph at once.

From Fireworks CS4, a double clicking inside a word will automatically select the whole word

9. Copy-pasting from Illustrator

Copy-pasting objects from Illustrator into Fireworks now has better fidelity since it comes through AICB (Adobe Illustrator ClipBoard). Attributes of Text, vectors etc are now preserved in Fireworks also.

10. Shift+Enter/Return

Text block now supports line breaks also even if there is a paragraph break set to it.

If a text block containing paragraph space settings set to it, then using just the "Enter/Return" key will take the cursor down, as per the paragraph space setting. To override this, we can now use "Shift+Enter/Return" key to take the cursor down, to the immediate next line (i.e. paragraph space settings will be overriden in this case)

If you press just the Return/Enter key, then the cursor goes to the next line as per the "space after paragraph" setting of 15. Instead, if you use Shift+Enter/Return key then the cursor goes to the immediate next line and the "space after paragraph" settings get overridden in this case.

11. Microsoft Office applications

Copy-pasting text and images from Microsoft Office applications is now working properly. Fireworks and Word are the perfect match. You can copy from Fireworks and paste into Office without difficulty.

12. Number of characters

Number of characters which can now be copy-pasted into a text block at a single time, has been increased from 2000 to 8000.

Where to go from here