Text Columns in Illustrator ?

[theloststory]

Is it possible to have text column support in Illustrator CS5?

Making columns manually is extremely painful. I am designing a 4 page brochure where it requires me to have text columns.

It was pretty easy in Freehand with built in text column support.

[Steve Fairbairn]

No problem. Just go to Type : Area type Options.

[Wade_Zimmerman1]

steve fairbairn wrote:

No problem. Just go to Type : Area type Options.

Not exactly no problem…here is the problem in order to advance from one column to the next column in Illustrator you need to use the return key to advance down the column  until that column is filled with text input or if you wish the space bar, you cannot use the enter key on the extended keyboard to advance to the next column>

Now I know that does not sound logical or useful, and you might not believe this but a very expert user of Illustrator that does work for newspapers and is extremely knowledgable about Illustrator use for publishing purposes put up a very good but illogical argument not to change this feature because it would waste resources that could be used for something else. I think though he was clearly out numbered that his argument won out.

I don't want to mention Gary Newman's name but the team did question us about it on the Mac Illustrator forum. Now true there were not multiple artboards at the time and so you were doing one page at a time and the type engine had performance issue, which I believe was caused by redundant coding, but now we have multiple artboards and having a real column feature for text frames and being even able to store such a text frame setting as a preset would be good as well, it might be time to bring that capability to Illustrator.

Right now the feature is almost but not always useless.

[Larry G. Schneider]

Threading text in columns has never been a problem. Here's a screen shot of an 8 page setup, showing the threading, for printing back to back on 11x17, all done in AI.

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[theloststory]

I figured this one out using 'Threaded Text'.

Thanks to everyone for their time...

[Steve Fairbairn]

... you need to use the return key to advance down the column  until that column is filled with text input or if you wish the space bar, you cannot use the enter key on the extended keyboard to advance to the next column

... which is exactly why it is usually easier to use single linked columns than multicolumn text boxes. I was just showing theloststory where to find what he was asking for. I have always found multicolumns difficult to work with except where there are large amounts of continuous body copy.

[JETalmage · Accepted solution]

FreeHand provides an End Of Column special character, as any decent text formatting program should.

Meanwhile, Illustrator still can't even do a Find/Replace involving carriage returns.

JET