- The Typewriter Tool
- First: Type a Bit of Text
- Sizing Things Up; Lining Things Up
- Do the Rest
- But, What If I Have a Paper Form?
- What Do We Gain by All This?
Like this article? We recommend
Like this article? We recommend
Like this article? We recommend
Sizing Things Up; Lining Things Up
First, we’ll change the text size to something appropriate to our form. Click again on the Typewriter button in the Typewriter toolbar (this boots it out of text-entry mode) and then click on the newly-typed name. Acrobat places a rectangle-with-handles around the text, as in Figure 6. Double-click on the text within the box and the text itself becomes selected (Figure 7). When you do this, the other tools in the Typewriter toolbar become active (also Figure 7).
){kind=small}
Figure 6 Clicking on the just-added text with the Typewriter tool selects that text; we get a typical boundary rectangle with handles.
){kind=small}
Figure 7 When the “Typewritten” text is selected, the other tools in the Typewriter palette let you change its font, size, and color.
There are two ways you can resize the text: click on the Bigger and Littler buttons in the toolbar (this is what I’m doing in Figure 7) or select a specific point size from the drop-down menu. I pretty much always use the Bigger/Littler buttons. I rarely have a particular point size in mind; I just want the text to look right compared to the form’s labels. One convenience is that the text size is “sticky”; once we’ve picked a text size, the Typewriter tool will use that size for all the rest of the text we place on the page.
Notice in the figure that you can also change the font of your text. I never do, myself, preferring to stick with the default Courier; I enjoy having the text look typewritten.
Now let’s tweak the text’s position. We click again on the big Typewriter button, to get the tool out of font-and-size mode, then click on the text again to select it; now we’re back to the rectangle-with-handles. While in this mode, we can reposition the entire text block: drag it around the page or nudge it using our keyboard’s arrows.
We’ll nudge our name downward, pressing the keyboard’s down arrow, until the name rests on or near the form’s “Name” line (Figure 8).
){kind=small}
Figure 8 When the typewritten text block is selected, you can drag it (or nudge it with the arrow keys) into its proper position.