Not sure which font you’d like to use in a layout or design? Try scrolling through the font menu and previewing each font that you currently have activated on your system as it’s applied to your text selection.
To do so, select a text frame with the Selection tool (or Direct Selection tool), press T to switch to the Type tool, and then click inside the Font field located in either the Control or Character panel. To preview available fonts as they’re applied to ALL the text in a selected frame (or multiple selected frames), scroll through the font list by pressing the Up/Down arrow keys.
The reason for switching tools before you start scrolling through the font list is because it allows you to preview the text without having to highlight it first. It’s much easier to decide which font works best in a design if you can actually SEE the text, without it appearing inversed over black as the result of highlighting it with the Type tool. However, note that in order to preview fonts as they are applied to a single line of text, or to specific characters within a selected frame (rather than ALL the text in a selected frame), you are forced to highlight the characters with the Type tool. It’s for this reason that I usually keep large stand alone text elements, (such as an intro spread header in a magazine layout) in their own text frames, without entering a paragraph break and a related subhead directly underneath it in the story.
This article was last modified on December 13, 2022
This article was first published on June 4, 2008
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