ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR (CS5)

Version tested: CS5, 15.1.0

Operating system tested: PC

Tested: 02 December 2024 / Missy Meyer

Where to get it: CS5 is unavailable. Current CC version: https://www.adobe.com/products/illustrator.html

Font file types to use: TTF/OTF, double stroke (TTF/OTF single stroke with additional effort)

Image file types to use: SVG, EPS

How to See & Use the Fonts

Yes, I’m still using a version of Adobe Illustrator from 2010. And yet, it has better font tools than a ton of other programs out there today. 😆  Most of this guide should still be usable for current versions of Illustrator, though some menu options may be in slightly different places.

In this example, we’ll be using the Spicy Sketcher font.

First, make sure that the font is installed on your computer or device. Check the “Install fonts on [operating system]” links for more information.

Open up Illustrator and create a new document. Click on the text tool icon, which is a letter T, on the left-side menu.

Click anywhere on your artboard and type in your text. It will most likely be in your preset default font and size. For me, those default settings are Myriad Pro at 12 point, which looks pretty tiny here.

Click on your text to select it as an object; you can then change the font and size. I’ve selected Spicy Sketcher 2 (the double stroke version), and sized it way up to 300 point.  Illustrator has applied a very fine stroke to the text, so we can immediately see it.

To make that stroke a bit heavier, go to the Stroke panel.  You can open it up by going to Window > Stroke from the top menu.  Though you may already have a quick link to it – the icon is a stack of lines, shown by the green arrow.

Here the weight of the stroke has been change to 10 point, which makes it a lot easier to see and work with. You can also see two different options for how the ends of each stroke will appear: clicking on the two center boxes above the red arrow will give you rounded ends (as seen in the top example) and clicking on the left two boxes will give you flat ends (as seen in the bottom example). We’ll carry forward with rounded ends.

After you’ve typed out your text, it’s time to get creative. We’re going to break the text apart into separate letters so we can play around with them. Be aware, after this step the text cannot be retyped, since this process will change it from a typeable font into vector objects.

Click on Object > Expand in the top menu.

A window will pop up; make sure that the box is ticked next to “Object” and then click the “OK” button.

This turns the text into vector shapes!  Now you can see the lines and nodes down the middle of each letter.  But if you click on any one letter, the entire word is selected. So we’ll need to ungroup the letters:

With the letters selected, click on Object > Ungroup in the top menu.

All of the letters are now separate objects!  You can proceed to resize, rotate, and otherwise edit them.

Illustrator keeps a consistent stroke size on all of the shapes, so even if you resize them much larger or much smaller, the stroke stays the same as all of the other letters.

After you’re done moving the letters into place, it’s time to save the design.

Go to File > Save As… in the top menu.

You’ll get a pop-up box. Here, you can name your file (top line) and select what type of file you want to export. I suggest choosing SVG from the drop-down menu; it’s the most universally accepted file type for other programs such as Cricut Design Space.

ADVANCED: You can use the true single stroke version of a font (in the case of our example, the Spicy Sketcher 1 font) if you want to put in a bit of work! Adobe Illustrator, like most programs, doesn’t like the open contours of a single stroke font, and closes the contours with a straight line connecting the start and end points. Here’s my YouTube video showing how you can remove that extra stroke to get the true single stroke letters!

How to Access Alternates, Ligatures, and Extended Character Sets

Some fonts will have extras, such as multi-letter ligatures or alternate characters. The example font, Spicy Sketcher, has both of those.

Here I’ve typed out the word BOGGLE, with the intention of using the double-G ligature.  I don’t need to select it; Illustrator has automatically replaced the two individual letters G with the ligature!  As you can see here, the two Gs are a bit different from each other.

If you’d like to turn off that automatic replacement, you’ll want to go to the OpenType panel.  To get it, go to Window > Type > OpenType from the top bar menu.  You may already have the OpenType panel somewhere in your shortcuts; the green arrow is showing that I already have it stacked with Character and Paragraph.

I’ve dragged the OpenType panel out by itself here.  You can see that the first icon on the bottom row, with the letters “fi”, is colored light blue, which means it’s turned on.

Click on that icon so that it isn’t colored blue any more to turn off the automatic ligature replacement.  You can see that the two letters G are now the same.

Now, let’s see how easy Illustrator makes it to find and use the alternates, ligatures, and other bonus characters. First, you’ll want to open up the Glyphs panel.  You can find it under Window > Type > Glyphs from the top menu. You may also already have it bookmarked on the right; the green arrow is pointing out its fancy “Aa” icon.

The Glyphs panel starts out in a state that’s far better than most of the other programs out there. Even with a double stroke font, the letters are all clearly visible. (Many other programs can’t handle the thin strokes of these fonts, and they appear invisible in this panel!)

But we can make it even better.  Click on the icon in the very bottom right that looks like two larger mountains, and it will increase the size of the grid.  You can click on this several times to make the grid even larger; here I have it at maximum size.  (The icon next to this one, with the smaller two mountains, will shrink the size of the grid.)

The Glyphs panel defaults to showing you all characters in a font; in order to get to the alternates and ligatures, you’ll likely need to scroll down to the bottom.

If you’re looking for all alternates for a specific letter, you can do that!  Here I’ve highlighted the letter E in my text, and from the drop-down in the Glyphs panel, I’m going to choose “Alternates for Current Selection.”

Now it’s only showing me the two characters that have been coded in as alternates for an uppercase E, plus the original base E.

I want to use the uppercase-height E that’s stylized like a lowercase, so I’ve double-clicked on it in the Glyphs panel.  Since I had the original E selected in my text, double-clicking removes whatever has been selected and replaces it with the double-clicked character!

Once you have all of the ligatures and alternates in your design, then it’s time to convert the letters into individual vector shapes.  As shown above in the first section, with your text selected, go to Object > Expand, make sure that the check box next to “Object” is ticked, and click OK.  Then with the text still selected, go to Object > Ungroup.

Since a double-letter ligature was used, there’s one more step to separate those two from each other. With those two letters selected, go to Object > Compound Path > Release from the top menu.  This will separate any multi-letter ligature, so that each letter can be moved individually.

And now you can resize, rotate, and move everything around to your liking.  Once you’ve finished your text design, save it!  As shown above in the first section, go to File > Save As…, then name your file and choose what file type (most likely SVG) you’d like to save.

How to Use SVG or Other Alphabet Sets

Some fonts will include a vector file containing the character set of the font, all in a true single stroke format.  If the font includes that, here’s how to use it. (The most recent ZIP for Spicy Sketcher includes this type of file.)

Click on File > Open in the top bar menu.

Navigate to the folder where you’ve unzipped the font files, and select the Spicy-Sketcher-Alphabet-SVG file. After you’ve single-clicked on the file name, click Open.

The full character set of the font will appear on your artboard, with the strokes in black and some fill in white.

You can turn off the fill by going to your Color panel.  Click on the solid box, then click on the white box with the red diagonal line through it in the small palette. This will turn the fill invisible.

Now you can select each individual letter that you want to use, and drag them over to the side. I prefer to move them over there roughly in the right order, then drag a box around the letters to select them. Then I copy them with the Ctrl+C shortcut, and then paste them (Ctrl+V) into a new document.  That way, I don’t have to worry about clearing out the letters I’m not using; my artboard only has the letters I want on it.  (You can always copy and paste additional letters from one document to the other.)

In that new document, you can then resize, rotate, move, and edit the letters until they’re exactly how you want them.  From there, you can save the file by going to File > Save As… in the top menu, naming your file, and choosing the file type (most likely SVG) that you’d like to save the design as.

If you’ve constructed your design on the same artboard as the rest of the full character set, be sure to delete all of the characters you didn’t use before saving, or else all of those extra characters will remain part of the saved design!

If this program has been updated since this test and this guide no longer works, please drop me a line at the contact form so I can update this page!