Topic awaiting preservation: aligning text in paragraphs (Page 1 of 1)

I want to format a paragraph in "justify full lines." I combed thru the "classroom in a book" manual and found the section that explains using the paragaph palette. Seems pretty simple. Align left and align center both work correctly, but when I choose Justify Full Lines or Justify All Lines, nothing happens to the selected text. This is what I do: choose selection tool > highlight text > choose Justify Full Lines from paragraph palette.

hmmmm. Obviously I am missing something or my Illustr. is screwed up.

-CRO8

This should work, just the way you are doing it.

Maybe you have linebreaks in your text that you are not aware of? That can happen if you have just copied at pasted the text from some other place like a webpage.
Just put your marker in the end of each line and press delete, to see if this is the problem.

ZOX

I am not quie sure what you mean by line breaks. My text is about 7 words across, for 10 lines. As I was typing, after each line I would hit ENTER, causing the curser to begin a new line. Is this what you mean by line breaks? Hitting ENTER after each line?

Yes, I did mean hitting the enter.
However, this would really only matter if you hit "justify full lines". If you use "Justify All Lines" it should still work...

I really don't have any other ideas why it is not working, since it sounds to me you are doing it right.

Still couldn't get it to work. The person who I took over from had old Illustr. files with Justify Full Lines working so I copy/pasted into my file, then modified the text. Boom. Done. Still though, it would be nice to know why I cannot do it myself. . .

THANKS ZOX!
CRO8

Don't force a line ending until you begin a new paragraph. In order to set a text block width, don't just click the text tool: click and drag to define the width of the text block. Then just type away to your heart's content. Illustrator will start a new line automatically when it reaches the limits of the defined text area. Only type "return" or "enter" when you want to start a new paragraph.

Now the paragraph pallette will work. The text can't have those hard line endings you created by typing "enter" - Illustrator considers each of those "lines" a paragraph, so it can't justify what you think of as a paragraph becuase it's seeing each of those lines as a paragraph. Make sense?

Steve- thanks, I understand your explanation and succeeded in testing it myself. It worked!

Thanks.
-CRO8