Let the fun begin! Click the new little icon on your menu bar and choose Show Character Viewer from the menu. The Mac OS X Character Viewer displays. If your window appears smaller than the one you see in the following figure, change the View option to All Characters and then click the disclosure trian- gles next to Character Info and Font Variation.
Then resize the window larger.
This is an amazing viewer that morphs con- stantly. Character Viewer lets you see and insert every variant of every glyph within all the fonts on your system. We could write an entire book about just this one feature, but it’s rather intuitive, so just give it a try!
Browsing Character Viewer
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Browsing Shapes
The Media browser is where you can find an assortment of shapes to add to your documents, workbooks, and presentations. You’ll also find the same shapes on various places in the Ribbon. Each shape can be customized and formatted in endless ways so that you can get just the right look. Shapes can be simple lines. Solid shapes can act as containers for text and even pictures.
Inserting Media browser shapes
Finding just the right shape is a breeze with the Shapes tab of the Media browser, shown in Figure 8-12. Click the Media browser’s Shapes tab to dis- play the built-in shapes available to you. You can filter shapes by category by clicking the All-Shapes pop-up menu at the top of the Media browser. At the bottom edge of the Media browser is a slider control, which you can drag left and right to zoom in on and out of the shapes in the palette. There are several distinct kinds of shapes:
✦ Solid shapes: A solid shape has an area that has a fill, such as a triangle or rectangle. Solid shapes can double as text boxes. To add text, you can simply start typing while a solid shape is selected. Every solid shape has a line that is the border of the shape. The fill area and the line are for- matted independently.
✦ Lines and Arrows: These shapes have no fillable area. Lines can be for- matted to have arrows at either end. Lines have thickness (weight) and style. You can make a solid shape by connecting a line to itself to form a fillable area.
✦ Connectors: Connectors are special lines that have elbows. You can adjust the elbows by dragging the yellow diamond associated with the elbow. Connectors are sticky in that if you connect the ends to other objects, when you move those objects the connector stays attached to the object.
✦ Callouts: These are boxes with connectors permanently attached.
✦ Action Buttons: These are available only in PowerPoint. Action Buttons have built-in properties that you can use for navigation, playing media, running macros, and more. We describe actions in Chapter 4 of Book IV on PowerPoint.
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Figure 8-12:
Browsing shapes.
You’re probably itching to get your hands on one of these shapely shapes, but first, here’s the procedure for inserting shapes:
1. Click inside your document in the approximate place you want to insert the shape.
2. In the Media browser, select the Shapes tab. Click a shape in the Shapes palette.
3. Hold down the left mouse button and drag across the document to draw a shape the size you want.
Alternatively, click once on the shape in the Shapes palette and then once again in the document to place the selected shape. This creates a 1 x 1 inch shape. You can also drag a shape from the browser: Right-click a shape in the browser and choose copy to copy it to the Clipboard.
4. Let go of the mouse button when you’re done.
If you hold the Shift key down while dragging a new shape, your shape’s height and width will retain their current proportions. This method keeps your squares and circles perfect so they don’t become rectangles and ovals.
Here’s some more info on manipulating shapes (see Figure 8-13):
✦ Rotating a shape: You can rotate a shape by dragging the green dot at the top of the shape. Press the Shift key while rotating to constrain it to 15 degree rotations.
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✦ Shape controls: Most shapes (but not all) have one or more yellow diamonds that act as shape controls. Drag a diamond to alter a shape’s appearance.
✦ Text controls: If you see a purple diamond, drag the diamond to alter the appearance of the text contained within the shape.
✦ Resizing handles: Each shape has eight resizing handles. The corner handles resize the shape proportionately in the direction you drag, whereas the other handles resize the shape by altering only the width or only the height. You may have to hold the Shift key down to maintain proportional height and width at times.
✦ Formatting text within a shape: You can take several different
approaches to formatting text within a shape. Drag over text within the shape to select text. Double-click to select a word or triple-click to select all the text before trying to format it. We discuss the formatting options in Chapter 6 of this minibook.
✦ Formatting the shape itself: When the shape itself is selected, you have your choice of formatting tools and methods. See Chapter 6 of this minibook.
Figure 8-13:
Controlling a shape and added text.
Rotation handle
Size handles
Text control Shape control
Making a curvy line
Even with the plethora of prefabricated shapes to choose from in the Media browser, you may have a hankering for some good old-fashioned simple shapes, or maybe you want to try your hand at creating your own shapes.
Mixed in with the shapes are three special tools that you can use to make your own lines and shapes: Curve, Freeform, and Scribble.
Follow the instructions in this section to modify motion path animation lines in PowerPoint as well, which we discuss in Chapter 6 of Book IV.
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Try using the Curve tool first, and after you get the hang of that one, try Freeform and Scribble. For our examples, we focus on the Curve tool:
1. Click the Media button on the Standard toolbar to display the Media browser, if it isn’t already visible.
2. Click the Shapes tab and then choose Lines and Connectors from the pop-up menu.
3. Click the Curve tool.
The Curve tool is the one that looks like a handwritten S. (Refer to Figure 8-13.) When you select the Curve tool, the cursor changes into a plus sign (+) to signify it’s ready to start drawing a line as soon as you drag in the document, spreadsheet, or presentation.
4. Click into your document and click the cursor as you move it; then move the cursor in another direction and click again.
Your line continuously gets longer as you move the cursor around, until you double-click the mouse, which signifies the end of the line you’re drawing. Each time you click while you move the cursor, you create a point, which behaves as an axis for your line’s curves.
This sort of drawing creates Bézier curves, as shown on the left side of Figure 8-14. By doing a variation on the steps in the preceding section to create a curvy line, you can end at the same point you started and then double-click at the end of the line, which results in a closed path. When you create a closed path, you get a solid shape, as shown in the right side of Figure 8-14.
Figure 8-14:
A wavy line (left) and a solid shape (right).
Editing points on a line or shape
Now the fun begins. You can format lines and the borders of solid shapes with great precision. For the ultimate in precision control of your lines and shapes, right-click or Control-click your line or shape and then choose Edit Points from the pop-up menu. Each click you made when drawing the line
134 Browsing Shapes
displays as a point. Right-click a point to display the Edit Points menu, as shown in Figure 8-15. You get the same menu when working with a line or a shape.
Figure 8-15:
Editing a point.
When Edit Points is active, you can drag, add, and delete points as well as control exactly how the line behaves while it passes through each point.
There’s still more! Right-click or Control-click right on top of a point. Notice the little handles that appear at the point, as shown in Figure 8-16. Drag the handles to control how the line passes through the point.
Figure 8-16:
Working the handles of a point on a line.
It’s often easier to work on small portions of a line by using the application’s Zoom feature to zoom in and work closer.
Shapes you draw and shapes from the Media browser are classified as vector shapes. For a great article that explains the difference between vector shapes and pictures (also known as bitmaps), look at this site: www.indezine.com/
articles/bitmapvectors.html.