Type Enhancements
In keeping with the other spit-and-polish improvements in Fireworks CS5, many refinements were made to type handling. More than a dozen updates were made to the typographic features alone. Many of the text enhancements are designed to save time:
- In text blocks, you can select characters with similar attributes. You also can select noncontiguous text characters, as shown in Figure 9.
- While in text-editing mode, Fireworks now allows you to undo/redo changes at character level.
- Fidelity has been improved when copying and pasting objects from Illustrator into Fireworks. Attributes of text, vectors, and so on are now preserved in Fireworks as well.
- In the Windows version, you can edit the font list box.
- Kerning between characters can be changed quickly by placing the cursor between characters and using keyboard modifiers and keyboard arrow keys.
- The Kerning slider value has been increased to 200.
- Kerning/tracking values are automatically mapped when opening Fireworks CS3 files in Fireworks CS5, preserving the original look of the text.
- A text-overflow indicator is shown if text won't fit when applied to text-in-path or text-on-path.
- Triple-clicking inside a text block automatically selects the whole paragraph.
- Text blocks support line breaks and paragraph breaks: You can set values in the Space After Paragraph field in the Properties panel, pressing Enter/Return respects the space, and you can press Shift-Enter/Return to insert a line break.
- Copied text from Microsoft Office applications is now pasted as text rather than as a bitmap.
- The number of characters that can be copied and pasted into a text block at a time has been quadrupled from 2,000 to 8,000.
Figure 9 Selecting noncontiguous text is easy now: Hold down Shift-Alt (Mac: Shift-Option) and click.
These enhancements alone make Fireworks CS5 significantly more useful than previous versions for creating realistic mockups and designs. For example, emulating CSS text styling is significantly easier in Fireworks CS5. You can quickly style your text to resemble the styling of a specific CSS rule (color, line height, character spacing, weight, style, or size), thanks to the improved selection features.