Many of the requests for gem I get from readers come in the class of , “ Do you know of any mode to do such - and - such ? ” But I ’m now and then require questions more along the lines of “ Have you found a successor for … ? ” It seems that with all the modulation the Mac platform has undergone over the preceding 10 , a clean number of older applications have gone the way of the Newton .
One of those apps is apparentlyTypeStyler , a popular app for creating textual art . Although the developer has foretell an OS - X - compatible version , readers head out that this promise is now several years old .
What ’s a fan of TypeStyler — or anyone needing to easily create typographical art — to do ? Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator can each do quite a bit with text these day , but if you do n’t already own one of these apps , I doubt you ’re going to shell out the big bucks just to whip up some text graphic . An economical option is BeLight Software’sArt textbook 1.0.6 (; $ 30 ) . Although not as full - featured as TypeStyler , it ’s only one - fifth the price , and it makes effective use of Mac OS decade engineering .
Using Art Text , you may make attractive logotype , banner , and newspaper headline . First you enter your desire text edition in the text box at the bottom of the Art Text window . Then you use your effects :
Here ’s an example of a canonical fashion I created :
Once you ’ve created a style , you could save it for future use by choosing File : Save to Styles . But you do n’t have to make your own textual styles ; Art Text let in over 60 built - in styles , accessible via the Styles sidebar . ( Tip : uncheck the “ use of goods and services schoolbook from style ” boxwood below the style listing ; this continue your custom text edition when you switch between style . )
Here are a few more examples of textual nontextual matter created with Art Text ; these are examples provided by the developer :
Despite what its name implies , you are n’t limited to working with text edition in Art Text ; you’re able to also choose one of more than 300 pictograms — in writing symbols and objects — and then go for cloth and effects to it . These images are especially utilitarian for flyers and sign , but they ’re also just fun to try out with .
you could even import your own images and practice stuff to them . However , transformations do n’t work with images ; you may make the persona narrow or shorter , but you ca n’t adjust geometry as you may with text .
Once you ’ve completed your creation , flick the Copy to Clipboard release if you desire to paste your work into another applications programme , or click the Export push button to relieve it as a art file ( in GIF , JPEG , PDF , PNG , or TIFF formatting ) ; with the latter option , you could pick out the DPI of the export look-alike . You ’ll be necessitate to select the specific part of the innovation you want to use , a nice feature that let you take how much background you desire to include .
My biggest complaint with Art Text is that many of its options are difficult to find — you need to flip window panes using controls that are easy to miss , or you need to or repair to menu commands . A number of feature were n’t obvious to me until I enter the software ’s assistance system of rules ( which is , thankfully , pretty good ) . It would also be nice if you could actually publish graphics from within Art Text , specially banners ; instead , you necessitate to open your creations in another software and print from there . last , the textbook box is quite small , which make it unmanageable to edit longer strings of school text , and entering such longer drawstring results in the text in the primary windowpane becoming smaller than it need to be .
Still , Art Text is a lot of fun to use and fills — at a reasonable terms — a niche left by TypeStyler .
Art Text requires Mac OS X v10.4 or later and a G4 , G5 , or Intel processor . It is a Universal binary .
